Coding:I seem to be running into mental speedbumps after 200 or so lines of Perl code. Errors seem to appear more often after those 200 lines. I also have a tendency to go back in and make the existing code more complex rather than add length one the script reaches 200 lines.
On the plus side, I'm spending more time writing Perl and SQL than I have in the past. Work is great because it keeps me mentally busy.
My whole
AIM social network graphing project has been on hold because of school, but I got a chance to work on it yesterday. I'm rewriting the
AIMSniff log parsing segment because it is
terribly broken.
School:Missing classes because your alarm clock is borked is no fun. My traditional alarm clock will now be backed up by
cron telling
xmms to play Rush songs.
On the plus side, I'm understanding things in one class that the rest of the class seems to have difficulty understanding.
There is
this one Unix server at school that I pretend to admin. It is no problem most of the time, but lately we have had some students using it for mischief.
Life:Being out from under the thumb of school's residential rules is refreshing. Living in an apartment is definitely a step up from living on campus. That said, I cannot wait to become a landowner. It is amazing how many constituency things are established by paying property tax instead of simple residency.
A situation back home that has been in the making for a couple of years has finally
boiled over. Using “Karen's” parlance, I knew “Melissa” was headed for trouble, but with “Jake?” (Isn't playing the names changed game fun?)
Invoking Russ's observation (paraphrased,) women are like apples. You have to climb high to reach the good ones, and the bad ones fall to the ground. The effort and determination required to reach the top apples shows responsibility. Jon's corollary to Russ's observation is that some of the top apples get tired of waiting and rot their stems so they fall to the ground. The problem is that you cannot tell that they chose to fall until after they have been on the ground for a while.
Digression on a union of life and workThe media coverage of a local government monopoly debate is amazingly one-sided. The media people assume that what the town government tells them about the availability of a certain utility is accurate.
The town government says that they need a monopoly because no private companies are willing to provide a particular service to their residents. In fact, there are at least two private companies providing the service in question to the town in question. I do not know why the media has not noted the discrepancy.
It gets interesting when you look at the costs being tossed about. The town government implementation would cost nearly $100 per resident for initial deployment. The also plan to charge around $40 per month for service. The private companies already have infrastructure in place and currently charge $26 per month for service.
It is also interesting that the private companies providing service are actually providing service. The government monopoly is currently providing thin air using a technology with a predicted general availability of late this year.
End Digression