Off By One

… Mostly, how I want a cup of coffee. Trivialities, everywhere.

I’ve had a geeky week, so far, consisting of (wait for it…) re-organizing my $HOME dir on the school, work, and home systems to, well…

It’s geeky and it involves subversion, one of the most useful tools in any programmer’s arsenal.

School has started back up, for those who are doing it, and I’ve made arrangements to take a course come January, and come May. This will have the benefit of allowing me to pursue part time work with the company I’m interning at, and maybe not be living from paycheque to paycheque (or at least not so obviously) while I finish the degree.

I keep reading the stuff Simon posts and thinking… I should start talking about that on here. The problem is that, like what he writes, my interests are a bit difficult to communicate. Would it mean anything to anyone to hear that I tracked down a bug in some data to XML serializing code that was causing the character set on e-mail messages to be misrepresented?

I thought not. But it was nifty.

Update

Char makes a good point, below. I really should have mentioned something I got in the mail — Notice that I’ve been invited to join a school Honour Society, as well as a “Hey, remember us when you’re looking for work” letter from IBM’s Giant Department of Automatically-Generated Form Letters to Anonymous Students (lovingly abbreviated as GDAGFLAS at ‘ole Big Blue).

So there, it’s noted.

So sorry about having dropped from the face of the earth for a week, folks. I know my readership isn’t huge, but i suspect at least one or two people missed me

So, here’s the scoop: The downtime resulted from Char and I moving, and shaw not moving as fast as we did, due to some wiring issues. I spent tuesday to today with no net access, which meant no mailserver, no webserver, etc. Very crappy. And, as i’m sure you can all imagine, also very jitter-inducing.

So, an update. Leaving aside private events that have kept me off-radar a bit of late, here’s what’s new:

We’re moved! Yay! The new house is coming together nicely, and i’d like to make a very public nod to Char, who has worked tirelessly to make the new place look like the home it’s going to be for the foreseeable future. The house looks nicer every time she puts something in place. Another nod that is not only necessary but huge is to Simon; without his help, there is no way the place would have been done on time. Bro, i owe you more than i can repay for your help, thank you again and again - i don’t know what we would have done without the time, effort, and general awesomeness you displayed getting this together for us.

Also new and notable, i’ve now skydived. I wasn’t really aware of the distinction, but … i sure as hell am now. There’s something very different about stepping out of a plane 3.5 km above the earth, even with two very professional and very kind instructors on my two sides, taking a breath at my own pace, looking out at the horizon, and with total awareness of what i’m doing and how, letting go and starting a free fall for 40 seconds, reaching terminal velocity as i fall. After 3000 feet falling, i had time to just look. And feel. And fly. The little hop we did in the training/first jump just doesn’t count, after that. Why even bother? A memorable t-shirt quote dad forwarded to me: “The meek shall inherit the earth. We own the sky.” This is how i feel. I will do this again, no doubt in my mind at all.

Last but not least, in 3 days, i go back to school. Year 2. Damn, i so look forward to this…