You know, I kinda feel bad for not posting as much personal stuff. Most of what I end up posting is Ubuntu or
Kwartzlab-related. I know there are at least one or two of you who might like to hear a little bit about me.
How do you feel about bullets? Maybe in reverse-chronological order.
I dressed up as The Blue Screen of Death for
Hallowe'en. Blurry MySpace shot.
I spent a chunk of the weekend at FSOSS. Yeah, that's Ubuntu-related. See the previous post. But it
was cool and I got to hang out with some really interesting people, like one of the engineers working on
the Raspberry Pi. I also made some contacts and got some ideas for future Ubuntu
things, if I ever have the
time.
I got a cold a couple of weeks ago and have been mostly
quarantined from seeing Ellen. This makes me sad.
I've become mildly obsessed with Dragon Age. I got the game
because a bunch of co-workers liked it and figured it would be a modest distraction, but I ended up getting sucked in.
I've played Origins and all the DLC. I haven't played Dragon Age II yet. I've been too busy to afford resurrecting the
time vampire. I have, however, bought the first volume of the tabletop role-playing game (which was a little
disappointing) and I've just finished reading the first novel. I started the second last night.
Speaking of obsessions, have you
seen the Doctor Who toys they've announced recently?!
My most recent order (including Idris, River and Scaroth, last of the Jaggaroth) should be arriving soon.
I should write about what I'm doing at work sometime. I've become a language designer as well as an IDE developer. It's all
pretty cool. My employer encourages us to blog about what we're working on, but I still feel weird about it (hence not
referring to said employer by name; not that it's a secret or anything).
I didn't get to do nearly as much gardening
as I wanted to do this year. Nearly every weekend was booked up with something: Ubuntu release parties, Stratford
plays with Ellen, SoOnCon, Toronto International Film Festival, Ubuntu Global Jam, our trip to Montreal, Car Free
Sundays, Kwartzlab cottage weekend... If not one of those, I was most likely spending time with Ellen or playing
Dragon Age. I did a little bit to enact my gardening plans, but I'd hoped I'd be further ahead.
Still, it was a pretty awesome summer. I can't say I really regret all the stuff I've been doing.
It's a provincial election time. I hate it when people say "Oh, there's an election, but I just can't bring myself to
care." But this time, I can kinda relate.
Thing is, I do care. There's a lot of provincial stuff I care about. It's just that from what I can tell, my local
race is a foregone conclusion, I don't think any of the candidates are awesome enough for me to feel like I should be
personally sticking my neck out for any of them, and I'm a little bit annoyed with every one of them for one reason or
another.
I actually mostly like the Liberal government's record. I think the HST is a fantastic idea. I like green energy and I
think they've been doing a reasonably good job of investing infrastructure. They're taking credit for uploading services
off of municipalities, which I think is a very good thing, but it's taken them an awfully long time to do it, and
they're only just getting started at the end of their second term.
I also don't like aspects of the campaign they're running, but it's not like any of the rest are much better. I'm really
annoyed about the G20, but it's not been an election issue, other than some noises from the NDP, and as there's been no
inquiry, I have no idea how much of that to lay at the feet of the province.
I would like to see people talking about building a new deal for cities, creating a sustainable funding model to get
them less dependent on property taxes, which create perverse incentives and disproportionately hurt the elderly, of whom
there will be many more in the near future. Other than talk of uploading and downloading, we aren't getting any of that.
And that's thinking way too small.
I'd like to hear more about public transit infrastructure than just the Liberals patting themselves on the back for
things like the LRT and the NDP promising to freeze fares (with no discernible plan to fund ridership growth).
I'd like to hear actual innovative ideas about how to solve Ontario's problems. That's probably too much to hope for.
So I don't know. I'll probably vote Liberal. I'm not a huge fan of the candidate, but I'm not a huge fan of any of the
candidates. Not even the Greens. That just leaves me with
my algorithm.
Listened to the latest This Developer's Life
yesterday. "Education". I enjoyed especially the Seth Juarez
interview.
Along with a bunch of useful advice and insight on how to think about school, Seth recommends every programmer should
learn 3 languages: a strongly-typed compiled language, a dynamic language and a functional language.
I've got the first two well covered with multiple languages for each, but besides a bit of Scheme in school (nothing
more than the usual trivial toy problems they give you to supposedly learn anything), I've never really delved into
functional languages.
So learning one might be a good goal to set for myself. That leaves me with two questions to get started: what language?
and what project?
I can kinda learn a language by reading books or whatever, but that's a pretty shallow surface understanding. I need a
project to really get into it. Now I don't particularly need more projects to get into, but maybe it's something I can
putter around with when I'm just hanging out at [[Kwartzlab]] making myself accessible to people.
The problem is what project? I actually understand why and how functional languages are useful these days, but none of
the half-dozen or so project ideas I have backburnered jump out as screaming for a functional implementation. So what to
do will require a bit of thought.
The more fun problem is picking a language. I can hear Eric's voice screaming "Haskell!"
right about now. I've also heard good things about Scala. And Erlang. Then there's OCaml and Lua and good ol' Lisp.
Have to think about it. I have a Python project I've been slowly getting started on that would really help me out at
work when it's done. After that, I'll look at functional a bit more, I think.