Arlene has been and gone, and as always the highs are higher when
she is around, and the ditch afterwards sucks through a broken
swizzle straw. This was alleviated mildly by the ongoing James Brown
soundtrack from Undercover
Brother has infected my subconcious mind. Even the casual
observer will note that I am neither black nor particularly proud,
but that movie kicks every ass regionally available, so I’m going
to get down with my bad self whether you like it or not.
Courses are starting to pick up now, and I’ve been asked
to do a couple of interesting things. I’m going to be
volunteering at the Open
Source Weekend, I’m putting together a first draft
of a funding request for a cleverish project that I’m
working on, I’m trying desperately to understand some part of
so that I can make it do what I want it to, I’m also
volunteering with the Carleton
Computer Science Society, whose ugly-as-hell web page I just
realized I now feel a moral imperative to do something about, and
on top of that, I’ve got a hell of a lot of school I need to take
care of. w00t!
I’m struggling right now to increase my understanding of
computers from “University Programmer” level, which I suspect
is viewed in the real world as being quaintly cute, to the
Programmer level which is proving, as you might imagine,
difficult. Finding bugs in an open-source product, you
see, is
dirt simple. It’s about as hard, and precisely as
interesting, as starting your rock collection in a gravel
driveway. Fixing those bugs, however, requires a far deeper
than I currently possess, especially when it involves some
of the creeping
that seem to infect the machines of the unwary. I’m going to have to
learn all this stuff, though, because the project that this grant
application is all about requires far and away more kung-fu, and
with wierd, Java-related, XML-ish,
distributed stuff that I don’t currently have a good meaty grip
on. More news as news is warranted.