Ye Olde Personal Update

Tagged as Music, Personal, Programming Languages

Written on 2010-02-17 05:32:19

2010 has, to date, been an odd year. I'm not entirely sure what I expected but I had something more idyllic in mind. The last two weeks, I've been struggling mightily with some personal issues and come to recognize some character flaws in the process. That's never fun. In particular, I have some communication problems and there are scenarios in which I simply shut down. Without warning or even conscious recognition, I withdraw and disengage. There are some rough similarities in these scenarios but not enough for me to figure out something conclusive about causality. The flaws caused trouble in both my personal and academic life in late January and early February.

My actual school courses have been going well so far but I've been screwing up my internship and am in the process right now of getting caught back up in that department. It's quite embarrassing as this is something I had looked forward to and involves people that I look up to. Murphy's Law applies to timing of our character flaws and communications problems too, I suppose. Valentine's Day was nice at least. I enjoyed preparing some really lovely Steaks with a Cognac-Peppercorn sauce. Clearly, my life is not *too* hard.

To try and keep that positive note, I'll end with a few things that have made me happy lately:
- Music by Local Natives, Band of Horses, Ametsub, Massive Attack (Heligoland is pretty solid),  Fleet Foxes, Jon Hopkins, The XX and Miles Davis' Flamenco Sketches.
- Writing wrappers for web services/APIs is (so far) reasonably straightforward and fun. It's nice to know that there's a ton of good data out there waiting for neat uses to be made.
- I have ideas and a desire to contribute to way more programming projects than I have time for. Some are others' projects. Some I'd start myself. I maintain that this is a good thing as long as I stay focused on what's on my plate and finish one thing at a time.
- I have ideas for future blog posts and github uploads. Still, I'm sticking to my "no pressure blogging" schedule for 2010. There are more important things than...well, this self-aggrandizing whatever it is. That said, I've always been surprised that I find my blog so useful for remembering where I was, what I was thinking and what I was struggling with years later. Some days it's the only way I can convince myself I'm moving forward.
- Factor is a nice language and I've spent a few hours playing with it again. There are trivial and non-trivial things I like. The biggest thing is the exceptional interactive nature of the language and how well integrated it all is. From a design standpoint, I just appreciate it. It seems to get a lot of things, compromises...right. More on that another time. Factor 0.92 was released today! It's been 2 years since the last release and I'll look forward to helping test a few things before 1.0 and keep hoping for native threading before 2.0. :)
PS: The Factor logo is a raptor! How has Randall Munroe *not* written an XKCD comic about this?
- I've finally found a few people (3) at school that are legitimately interested in programming and care about it. It's taken over a year. That's far too damn long.

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