Something old, something new#

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 19:30:47 +0000

Sorry for the silence. This has been a scheduling thing mostly: I managed to schedule 'breaking my arm' for about three days after 'starting a new job', and together with the ongoing project of 'being a new Dad' (I plan to pivot that one into just 'being a Dad' if and when I finally feel like I know what I'm doing - so maybe in about 20 years or so) this has left not much time for discretionary writing.

Something old: a couple of months ago Vsevolod Dyomkin emailed me to ask if I wanted to be featured in his series of interviews with Lisp hackers (or, in my case, former Lisp hackers). After keeping him waiting for unsnsionably long - partly due, of course, to the aforementioned bone breakage - finally I have sent him my answers and he has posted them

(I can't decide if I'm actually serious about writing something justifying the existence of ASDF, or if I'm just going to let it lie. It can probably be summarised as "it made sense at the time")

Something new:

• New job: I'm now working at Simply Business, nominally as a Ruby programmer but in practice so far mostly doing Puppet and Vagrant and general devops-y deployment-y stuff. It's slightly odd having a commute further than the spare bedroom (which is no longer actually spare now, please note) but I seem to have adjusted mostly to having to get up in the morning, and the walk to work is podcast time. Except when it's Spotify time. Or when I take a bike, but for a 2km journey that often seems a bit like overkill.

• New consumer toys. After dropping the Desire S and breaking the screen on it twice, I gave up and sniped a second hand Galaxy Nexus on Ebay. It's a bit like running an Android phone, except that it has no stupid skins or preloaded apps, and it gets timely updates to the newest OS version. Seriously, there is a certain irony in the fact that a phone I chose because it was open and easy to reflash or root turns out to be the first Android phone I've owned that I haven't
• needed* to reflash or root. Flushed with that success (and, for the first time in a while, flush also with some ready cash), I bagged a tablet too. Nexus 7, Jelly Bean again, it's basically like a big version of the phone except that it doesn't make phone calls.