daBlog by goddess101

My Program

while (life) {
  if (lemons)
    makeLemonade(lemons);
  else
    continue;
}

Signs of Life

It’s cold and dreary outside right now, but on our balcony, new life has already sprouted out of the pots which we had thought were completely ruined by this past winter’s frost. We have green onions ready to be picked and used in tonight’s meal. What a minor miracle that is! Something out of seemingly nothing… ain’t springtime grand?

It makes me happy to watch our plants grow. We grew tomatoes last summer, and watching those little bulbous, miracles of life get larger and turn ripe filled me with so much joy. It’s like in E.T.... remember when that once dead sunflower plant bloomed again? Remember how good that scene made you feel? Well, it’s like that. Joy. Happiness. Good feelings all around.

Life is good.

Taking a Break

Ah, it feels good to finally poke my head out of my proverbial programming hole and take a break from intense the computing cilibrar and I have been doing lately. January was all about Ruby on Rails and asiaquake.org. February, I was doing some intensive HTML, Javascript, CSS, PERL and XSLT for xprogramming.com. And these past few weeks, I’ve been doing nothing but learning autoconf and libtool, writing SOAP servers and clients, parsing YAML config files, and developing interfaces in both Ruby and C for the CompLearn project. CompLearn has been particularly exhausting, because I haven’t worked in C for 3 years and those pointers are damned intimidating!

Learning and relearning so many languages is great tho, because programming has become much more intuitive to me. I’m now able to jump into a program without much hesitation and start programming in it because it’s all about inherently knowing the basic rules of programming and learning by example what’s already in front of you. It’s a “power” I’ve always wanted…. like a person who already knows several languages and can pick up another rather easily, or like AFKAP (The Artist) who taught himself to play something like 26 instruments. Granted, I would prefer knowing several spoken/social languages, versus programming ones, but it’s quite freeing to be able to communicate and work in them all.

Anyhoo, cilibrar and I just completed an alpha release of the new CompLearn package, so now we’re just relaxing for a bit. I’m hoping to spend the next few days leveling up my World of Warcraft character. LOL. Or doing yoga, or whatever. It sure is hard to think of things to do when I’m trying to “take a holiday” from work.