Mike Pirnat

Good news, everyone!

After a couple days of playing Twitter tag with Tarek Ziade, we finally met up for lunch at PyCon, where, in addition to having a lovely conversation, he was kind enough to give me a personal tour of his Atomisator framework for data aggregation.

Atomisator is much savvier than Yahoo Pipes at things like removing duplicates and not mangling content, so I’ve kicked Pipes to the curb and hooked up the Unified Python Planet feed to my Atomisator output.

What this means for you, lucky reader, is that everyone who subscribes to the Unified Python Planet should not only stop getting duplicates, but, more importantly, have legible code samples directly in the feed. (It’s okay if you need to take a moment to process this joyous news. It makes me pretty damn happy.)

Please let me know if you experience any flakiness with the new, improved feed.

I want to give major, major thanks to Tarek! Atomisator is really well suited to this purpose, as well as some other stuff I’m now curious to tinker with.

geekery, pycon, python atomisator, planet, pycon, python

…of 2008. (Not that I’m really blogging that much these days.)

Everyone else seems to be doing these big end-of-year posts, summarizing their years, their learning, achievements, setbacks, joys, and sorrows. I’m not sure when it happened, but I’ve largely lost the patience to go on and on about my life (I guess Twitter kind of takes care of that for me any more), so I’ll keep this short (if not sweet).

2008 was a year. We had a miserable few months of illness and sleeplessness, followed by a good long stretch of absolute, utter joy with our daughter, Claire. I read less than I like to, but greatly enjoyed what I did. I wrote far less code for myself than I like to, but I was able to instigate a quantum leap in the level of Javascript written at work, as well as contributing a number of fixes back to the Dojo framework. I played an awful, awful lot of Rock Band. I enjoyed PyCon and Velocity, in spite of their flaws, and I wish that work and family allowed me more time to contribute to the community. I continued to grow as a photographer, though I was frustrated by several months of inaction and lack of inspiration from which I’m still trying to play catch-up. And in these rocky economic times, I’m happy to remain in my position at American Greetings.

I’m overwhelmingly proud of my wife’s accomplishments, both academic and parental. I’m ridiculously happy to be my daughter’s father–the role of Daddy suits me just fine; she amazes me daily and has truly transformed my emotional well-being.

I am immensely grateful for my friends, for my family, and my good fortune. I hope for a better, more peaceful future in 2009, that we may all heal the hurts of these mad days and enjoy the fruits of the life we’re given.

To all who may read this, here’s a quick little toast to the passing of the old year and the dawning of the new. Cheers!

claire, dojo, life, pycon, python, work

There’s a lot of excitement on the ClePy mailing list about trying to bring PyCon to Cleveland in 2010. David Stanek is leading the charge, getting folks talking, and planning, and motivated.

Clevelanders who want to help out bringing Python’s premier conference to our fair city should head on over to the bid page on the Python wiki and lend their names and support.

Non-Clevelanders, have no fear! Cleveland’s really quite misunderstood and under-appreciated. We’ve got a great restaurant scene (we’re home to the newest Iron Chef!), tons of attractions (like the Science Center and Rock Hall), world-class museums and other cultural institutions (maybe a few of you have heard of the Cleveland Orchestra, which is rated among the top 3-5 worldwide), the nation’s second largest performing arts center, beautiful parks and lake views, and more–all within walking distance of either the likely conference site or available with a quick jaunt on the rapid transit system. Plus the river hasn’t caught on fire for decades, but you can savor the legacy with really good local beer.

In short, there’s plenty to love about bringing PyCon to Cleveland. Let’s do it!

clepy, cleveland, pycon, python

Stairway
Originally uploaded by mikepirnat.

The security line at O’Hare was almost non-existent, so now I’ve got a bit of time to kill and (since “free wireless network” doesn’t seem to want to give me any DNS) have the laptop open, it’s probably time to digest and process my PyCon experience.

Overall, I felt strangely disconnected this year. I didn’t end up dining with any of the circles I’d overlapped with in years past, didn’t go to any parties, didn’t stay up late hacking on personal projects, didn’t hang out on the IRC channel (thanks a lot, wonky wi-fi), didn’t have a presentation to worry about, and didn’t end up being able to wake up in time to get my name on the list for Lightning Talks. Heck, since I didn’t have the laptop out much, I barely even took notes this year.

What I did do was shoot a lot of photos, some of them acceptable, nearly filling my 2GB card over the course of the conference. I’ve only had time to upload one as I just haven’t had the time, motivation, or energy to sort through everything at the hotel. (And it’s not like uploading via the sippy-straw of the hotel’s in-room wireless would have been terribly practical either.) I enjoyed briefly meeting Ted Leung before the opening keynote, and was amazed (and somewhat intimidated) by the number and variety of fancy camera toys he’d brought with him as he performed his duties as official photo dude. A number of folks stopped me and asked me questions about my camera and flash; I tried not to sound like too much of a moron when answering them. The weird thing is that everyone assumes if you are toting a DSLR around that you can’t possibly take bad pictures with “a camera like that,” when in reality shooting with a DSLR is the fastest way to find out exactly how much you suck at photography. I can get some good (and sometimes above-average) results, but I really have to work at it, so I try to stay humble. Also it helps to never show anyone your bad shots.

While I’m still on the camera talk, I learned that I need to bring extra batteries for the flash, recharge the camera battery while I sleep or bring a spare, and that I should probably buy a spare memory card so that I don’t feel any last-day storage pressures when I’ve been too lazy to dump things down to my laptop. I’ve also learned to swallow my pride and kick the camera over to automatic metering when the lighting is tricky and I need to shoot quickly–I have some almost-good shots ruined by camera shake that could have been avoided if I hadn’t been trying to be all manly and shooting in full manual with no flash. Finally, a happy discovery–the bad-ass heavy-grade Gorillapod that my wife gave me for Christmas makes an excellent hybrid of monopod (albeit rather short) and grip/brace. I found that I could keep the camera very steady by placing two of the legs against my body and supporting the camera with the third, making it easy to track and shoot moving subjects without too much wobble.

On the dining front, the huge posse of Cleveland folks managed to get out to some tasty meals. On Wednesday night we lucked into an unheard of thirty-second wait for a table at Frontera Grill and enjoyed a meal that simply cannot be described in words. Friday night we (along with Bill Zingler, a compadre from the Turbogears sprint in ‘06) hoofed it down to Ram, a grill and brewhouse, where the beer and food were pretty good. We didn’t stay for too long though as we were greatly outnumbered by a vast sea of douchebaggery–drunken BMW-driving jerks in their sport jackets acting out a sad, strange re-enactment of their college (or more likely high school) days. We rounded things out on Saturday with a visit to the local Giordano’s for deep-dish pizza, a first for one of our number, where we proceeded to annihilate their supply of Fat Tire.

Gosh, that’s an awful lot of text without really even talking about the conference… Which might in itself be a comment about the conference.

Everyone knows the wireless network was stinky, so I won’t spend too much time one that. It wasn’t until this afternoon that I was able to even connect in any way approaching reliability. By then, really, there wasn’t much point.

It seems like the consensus is that the Lightning Talks really suffered this year from the overwhelming dominance of the (lackluster) sponsor talks, to which I can only agree. It was really disappointing to see so little time available to community speakers during what, to me, is really the heart and soul of PyCon. There were a few gems on Friday and Saturday, but mostly… ho-hum.

And I was underwhelmed by a lot of the presentations too. A lot of things that I thought would be really useful or deep ended up being too light, too dull, or just not well presented. I seemed to have a knack for picking a lot of duds. Even two thirds of the tutorials that I attended (Eggs and Testing) were letdowns, due to the lack of being able to do any of the exercise material thanks to the network (Eggs), and the repetition of material from last year’s PyCon (Testing).

The big wins for me were the Advanced SQLAlchemy tutorial (slide runner rocks! and if it’s possible to be in love with an ORM, I think I am!), Kevin Dangoor’s talk about TG2 and Dojo, and John Harrison’s insanely cool Halloween laser-zapping extravaganza, which was probably the most fun presentation I’ve been to in four years of attending PyCon. The first two will have practical benefit for me in my daily existence, and the latter–complete with head-tracking, 3D VR goodness–was just frickin’ awesome. A note to future PyCon presenters when coming up with your proposals–lasers, lasers, LASERS!

I don’t mean to be so down on PyCon. I had a good time, I was just exhausted from one end to the next. Exhausted before I even left, exhausted while I was there, and (surprise surprise) exhausted now that I’m home. I did really enjoy meeting folks, networking a bit, and soaking in the vibe… It just didn’t manage to leave me as energized as I’d gotten used to, spoiled as I’ve been by PyCons past. Though stumbling across the excellent performance of “Stairway to Heaven” in the atrium thoroughly lifted my spirits. So few people seemed to even notice that it was almost like a private gift just for me.

I’ve got about seven hundred photos to wade through to find promising candidates to share; please bear with me as the lucky few take their time to escape into my Flickr stream.

food, geekery, photos, pycon, python

IMG_1678.JPG
Originally uploaded by mikepirnat.

Many, many photos from PyCon are now online. I shot a bunch as did fellow ClePy member Dave Noyes. And thanks to the photo contest (which still doesn’t have a winner, grr…), there are a whole bunch of other photos too. Many of them are so-so, but for artistic composition and image quality, I am a big fan of Snakeypants’s stuff.

Next year, if I’m not presenting (too distracting!), I’m definitely bringing my DSLR…

photos, pycon, python

Since I was unable to attend the sprints, my PyCon experience wrapped up on Sunday. Here are my highlights and thoughts on the third day…

Robert M. Lefkowitz (r0ml), the fourth and final keynote speaker for PyCon 2007, completely and utterly amazed me. As the talk began, I thought we were in for 90 minutes off dreary academia, but my first impression was almost immediately dispelled by the fascinating rhetorical journey through the meaning of “computer literacy” and, at a more fundamental level, the idea of literacy itself. This talk raised many interesting questions, such as: where is the canon of programming? is it better to express algorithms in code or English? why aren’t the keywords of programming languages localized? how do we read code aloud? A great counterpoint to the OLPC talk was this question–how many underprivileged Brazilian kids with OLPC machines who press the “view code” button are going to know enough English to be able to (re)program them? Best quote of the talk: “Great programmers break the rules elegantly; bad programmers break the rules without realizing it.” Sprinkled throughout were references to so many interesting books that I think my Amazon wishlist just grew two sizes. This talk had people buzzing about it all day, and during the closing remarks we heard that there is interest in having that same talk professionally recorded and uploaded to YouTube. Mind-blowingly good.

Sadly, however, this talk, coupled with being out too late the night before, and a general lack of sleep, left me pretty fuzzy-headed for the rest of the day. I was barely conscious during the “Easy Creation of Interactive Tutorials” presentation, which I could tell looked really neat but which I couldn’t summon the energy to fully pay attention to. What I got out of it amounted to this entry in my notes: “crunchy turns simple HTML + Python code into coolness.” Yessir, I sure was insightful,

Luckily, I was a little more alive for Kevin Dangoor’s “Wonderful World of Widgets on the Web” talk, which discussed ToscaWidgets, the subproject that recently exploded out of TurboGears. In case anyone hasn’t noticed, user are demanding nicer and more graphical interfaces on their web applications, and ToscaWidgets seems to do a good job of being a fairly declarative Python encapsulation of the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript necessary to render the widget to the web. Kevin demoed a TinyMCE widget, showed us how to hook up a FormEncode validator to a widget to get automatic error handling and type conversion, illustrated nice graceful degradation capabilities in a ratings widget (for users who don’t have JavaScript) and more. As a nice bonus, widgets are easy to add to the Cheeseshop so that they can be easy_installed at a moment’s notice. I think it’s great that this package is being factored out of the core TurboGears code and released into the wild for other projects to take advantage of; it’s a prime example of the “rising tide floats all boats” philosophy that I really admire about TG.

Titus Brown’s “Testing Tools for Programmers” talk discussed a collection of simple, easy-to–use tools that he developed that work nicely in concert with one another: twill does functional web testing (really lacking only JavaScript support); wsgi_intercept lets twill talk directly to WSGI apps, allowing you to use the same twill script to test both the WSGI app itself and the complete web stack with a live server; scotch (a pun on WSGI’s whisky-like pronunciation) lets you record and replay WSGI data and generate twill scripts; and figleaf is a code coverage recording tool that can combine coverage from multiple runs and emit a unioned result for your perusal. There’s still a great need for documentation on these tools, but they’re otherwise ready to make your life a lot less sucky. And he remains eminently quotabe–on testing and WSGI,”You have no excuse. Test your web apps. If you’re not using WSGI, there’s something else wrong with you,” and in reference to starting a “testing-in-python” mailing list, “[I wanted to] get some cross-talk happening in the testing community like there isn’t in the web community.” Good stuff; you can check it out yourself.

I had some familiarity with trac before, but I still found new stuff to love in the “Software Development With Trac” presentation, specifically the bitten plugin, which glues in a dashboard of continuous integration results, stats and graphs about lines of code over time, passing and failing tests, and more–you can click on a failing test and jump right to the relevant source code! This killer feature pushed me off the fence, and I’m now very excited about trying to bring trac into my office.

Not tremendously excited by any of the late afternoon sessions, I went to an open space talk led by Gary Bernhardt of our local ClePy group. Gary’s been working on a thing so far called RESTdb, which is a RESTful database application queried via HTTP verbs instead of SQL. Like SQLObject and SQLAlchemy, RESTdb is very delcarative, creating the database from the Python code. But unlike a relational database, the client knows nothing of the database schema, just the names of resources that it wants to access. The project is only two weeks old so far, but it can already do many interesting things, and can easily support 10,000 local machine queries per second. Some challenges of a RESTful database include the impossbility of the client to introspect the database at all, and that you don’t do joins (since it’s not a relational database), so you have to think a little differently. The room wrapped up its allotted time with a great discussion of what REST is and isn’t, and a good time seemed to be had by all.

Highlights of the final round of lightning talks included a very cool demo of pyglet, a pure-Python “to the metal” game engine that’s programmable via XML documents; a demonstration of how to solve the Rubik’s cubes that we all received in the Big Piles o’ Swag (including solving it behind your back!); some talk about a bizarre and interesting alternate Python implementation called RPython that specially compiles your Python code to make it much, much faster, but which also stands a good chance of hurting your brain in doing so (“it’s like writing C in Python” and “you can take drugs or write RPython”); some stuff that I couldn’t quite follow about xerblin; and the worst and best ways to do document tree conversion (which I wasn’t able to take any notes on as I was already running late to pick up the waiting cab).

I managed to score a few more T-shirts today, and I put in an order for a medium Python zip-up sweatshirt (which had sold out nearly instantaneously on Friday). I think that brings the T-shirt total up to at least eight or nine; I’ll have to get a final count when I get home and start unpacking. I expect it’ll be like opening a series of Russian nesting dolls…

Sadly, there are no results yet for the photo contest–hopefully I’ll hear about the results in a day or two. I don’t want to toot my own horn too much, but of what was submitted to flickr in time for the contest deadline, most of it fell into one of a few categories: photos of the OLPC laptop, photos of speakers speaking, photos of acquaintances in the hall or meeting rooms, and photos of meeting rooms or hallways with random crowds milling about. I posted a couple of uncorrected candids from the hotel bar of Dave Stanek and Gary Bernhardt poring over a laptop that (I think) really captured the collaborative and fun spirit of PyCon. But we’ll see what the judges think… I will post the rest of my photos to my flickr account once I get home and have a chance to offload them from the camera.

Now I’m on the plane, killing time, and being That Guy With The Laptop Out, which is something I’m enjoying because I never get the opportunity when I’m traveling elsewhere. Really, I’m making up for a damaged headphone earpiece that’s preventing me from chilling with my iPod for the duration of the flight. I get in around 11 PM, then it’s straight to bed so that I can be in early at work for a two-day training session.

As always, the Python community continues to impress me with its warmth, openness, and welcoming nature. It’s amazing to be surrounded by almost 600 strangers (I think the final number was 593!) and feel right at home; and it’s really rewarding to be able to turn PyCon acquaintances into good friends. I can’t wait for next year!

geekery, pycon, python, travel, turbogears

Some quick thoughts and notes on Saturday at PyCon that turned into not-so-quick notes as I started writing them…

I was initially excited that Adele Goldberg was giving the day’s first keynote (I’m a bit of a PARC fanboy, really enjoyed Dealers of Lightning), but sorely disappointed that an hour of hearing a lot about the current state of public schools and computers in public schools that I was already aware of turned into what felt like an advertisement for what amounts to been-there-done-that educational software (now with ZJaxian pizzaz!). Too bad. (Plus she cited the NYT article about the “scrotum” controversy which is a dubious source due to some (IMO) highly questionable journalistic practices.)

“Scaling Python for High-Load Web Sites” felt strangely like a time warp back to the presentation that David Stanek and I did last year, but with slightly less management-imposed hand waving. A very weird experience.

The testing tools panel likewise didn’t manage to deliver any earth-shattering insight into testing, but did provide plenty of good laughs, and makes me wonder when we’ll start seeing some of the panelists in rehab for “dot addiction.”

Guido’s lunchtime keynote skipped any discussion of the current state of Python, and instead dove into a preview of what’s coming up in Python 3(000), the first alpha of which is due this summer. Some stuff seems really good (print as a function, dictionary views, string and bytes, the int/long unification, division, absolute imports, and the exception changes), some things seem intriguing and mildly weird (string formatting, set literals and set comprehensions), and some things seem downright bizarre and possibly awful–specifically the keyword-only parameter syntax, which at first glance looks like a horrible typo. Luckily the (IMO unnecessary) switch/case stuff was put to a vote on the spot and soundly vetoed, so it looks like it will (thankfully) not end up happening.

Google uses two-space indents. Make of that what you will. (I am a recovering 2-space indenter, now greatly preferring 4-space.)

Serving soup to a ballroom full of laptop-toting geeks seems like an inherently bad idea…

I very much enjoyed Dan Milstein’s talk on “Embedding Little Languages in Python” which illustrated some great ways to turn friendly little DSL’s into very clean and well-structured, declarative Python code. I’ll definitely be grabbing a copy of his slides.

Likewise, I thought Aaron Bickell’s soaplib was a hit, reminding me of Python’s xmlrpclib on the client/server proxy side, and a bit of CherryPy/TurboGears on the server side. And it’s a lot like TGWebServices, so that’s cool too–multiple brains converging independently on a similar solution means it’s probably a pretty good approach.

My presentation went pretty well, although I was definitely rushing to get through all of the essentials. The palpable sense of relief when it was complete was quite amazing. I got some good questions and several compliments throughout the afternoon, so that felt pretty darn groovy.

I went to an open space talk where Ian Charnas and Brian Beck from the Case contingent of ClePy showed off Pagoda, an open-source CMS built on top of TurboGears. Looks nifty; this should be a project to watch.

Saturday’s lightning talks included some significant gems: Kevin’s TGWebServices talk had some amusing Java/SOAP zingers; the tale of using Python on a Series 60 to map cell phone towers as a “poor man’s GPS” was charmingly entertaining; a quick hit on the state of Python in Japan won our hearts; and Ian Bicking’s Zjangogears brought down the house with laughter. Awesomeness all around!

I missed the OLPC demo session last night, opting instead to join up with a dinner group (Kevin, Mark, and Karl from TG, a bunch of ClePy people, Bruce Eckel, and some new names and faces that are presently eluding me). Dinner was followed by a whole bunch of standing around in the hall talking, which evolved into hanging out at the bar enjoying beer and code with ClePy people, and eventually the EWT party up on the twelfth floor. I gave in to my exhaustion at left the party around one… I’m sure it kept going for quite a while.

I’ll save my thoughts about today’s activities for another post, once I have time to digest it.

geekery, pycon, python, travel

After escaping from the madness of the office, we had a pleasantly uneventful flight to Dallas, notable only in that it was coworker Dave Noyes’ first time on an airplane. I enjoyed watching his reactions to things that had become completely natural and unremarkable to me, and I smiled a little inside remembering what it used to be like. Had a small bit of annoyance with the hotel (the main hotel decided at the last minute that they couldn’t accommodate our Thursday-night reservations), but there was free breakfast, so I’m less annoyed now. We missed the shuttle to the main hotel by about fifteen seconds, so we ended up grabbing our bags and hoofing it over to the Marriott Quorum, and leaving our stuff with the bellman.

I’ve been taking fairly copious notes this year so that I can try to bring back some useful stuff to AG. I won’t do massive dumps of that here, but will comment on a few things that have stuck out in my mind.

First, the high points:

• Today’s keynote from Ivan Kristic about One Laptop Per Child which I had been mildly intrigued about but slightly skeptical of… and I’m blown away. They’ve engineered a great tool, and the project is very inspiring. They’re using Python for darn near everything, including an amazing sounding filesystem that’s more of an object store, capable of timelining, collaboration, N-way syncs, and more. Mesh networking. Dual-mode touch pad that can be used as a writing/drawing tablet. Durability of the unit. Experimental battery chemistry. And what I am really blown away by is the “view source code” button on the keyboard that can instantly show you what’s running and let you tinker with it! Frickin’ cool. Ivan gave out one of the prototype laptops to Guido and one to an attendee–I got to hold the laptop and get a couple photos of probably not very good quality that I might post later. I’d love to figure out a way to help out; time is unfortunately a big problem there. But this stands a good chance of changing the world in a positive way… Very exciting! I’ll probably stop by the laptop demo session tomorrow night to see it in action.
• Using Stackless gave a lot of interesting insight into rigging up cross-task communication within Stackless, how to make asynchronous API calls look like nice, simple synchronous ones, and some other cool stuff. I’ll definitely have to dig into this more.
• Lunch! Fajitas! Little bean burritos! Refreshing salads! Yum!
• A bonanza of swag: on top of the four shirts in the conference tote bag, I scored an EWT “Born To Code” shirt and a small Rubik’s cube, bought a “Zen of Python” shirt that’ll give me some much needed color options (black is starting to get old), and scored a Google Python shirt (which must be earned by having a suitably engaging conversation with one of the guys at the table; I spoke with a chap named Thunder, who has probably the second coolest name (number one still belongs to Ransom Love)).
• Ian Bicking’s “WSGI: A Series of Tubes” combined whimsy and hand-drawn diagrams with a nice, friendly overview of what WSGI is all about. I keep missing the WSGI bus, so it was great to finally get clued in. Some interesting philosophical topics here, like microframeworks vs. monolithic frameworks.
• Chatting and hanging out with friends from PyCons past as well as Clepy folks who are joining us for the first time. Long story short–geeking out around cool people rocks!

Slightly less awesome:

• The network is apparently a lot better now that we have our own implementation, but I’m still having tons of problems with it. Probably because there are only three 802.11b channels, and I have no g or n capabilities on the hand-me-down PowerBook G4. Still, a lot less painful than last year.
• I was somewhat let down by the i18n talk; it was more from the perspective of someone new to i18n and some very basic techniques and hazards, ended quickly, and there were many unaswerable questions. On the plus side, I did learn that difference between StringType and StringTypes.
• I had been looking forward to the PyCon 2007 Web Framework Panel, and while there were some fun moments and the occasional pointed and politically incorrect remark, I didn’t really learn anything new about any of the projects that were represented.
• I had hoped to get some useful programming insight out of “Iterators in Action” but instead learned some important things about presenting that I will take into consideration for prepping for my session tomorrow. Specifically, don’t spend a ton of time talking about all the things you don’t have time to talk about–omit it entirely or find a smooth transition and skip directly past the things you can’t talk about; don’t keep harping on it. Also, I should consider the pros and cons of animated slide transitions; they seemed overused here, but in one or two places could be helpful.

Lightning talks are starting to wind down… So it’s probably about time to find a posse and go hunt down some food, followed by an exciting evening of tweaking and practicing my presentation.

geekery, pycon, python, travel

At tonight’s ClePy meeting, I gave a test run of my PyCon 2007 presentation, Dateutil to the Rescue! I got some good feedback (among other things, it’s way too long for a 30-minute slot, definitely the better form of the length-of-presentation problem), and look forward to tuning it up before delivering it in front of a huge crowd on the 24th.

Mike Nugent put together a nice presentation on regular expressions in Python that resulted in a fun and entertaining discussion in the group.

Next month, Ralph Heimburger will talk about ReportLab, and there will again be pizza and pop–come on down if you’re feeling Pythonic! Or hit us up on the mailing list if you’ve got Python web-fu and want to help build a nice group management website with us.

clepy, geekery, pycon, python

Just received the official notice that my PyCon presentation proposal was accepted! I plan on basking in the warm glow of non-rejection for a couple of days, and then commencing forthwith with the stressing out about getting it pulled together in time given all the other insanity of my life.

In other news, Liz and I had a lovely, low-stress, very lazy Thanksgiving weekend. To my great surprise, I put away close to 700 pages of The System of the World, finishing it early Saturday evening, and achieving my goal of finishing the Baroque Cycle before the end of the year. At nearly a thousand pages apiece, these books have taken some serious commitment from me (my reading-for-pleasure time being significantly diminished from its former glories), and I’m really, really happy that it paid off so well. Of course, now I have to read Cryptonomicon again, but that can wait a bit.

Work is about to be really interesting, in the possibly-very-good-interesting sort of way (rather than the omfg-you-want-it-when way). Details are still pending, so I’ll keep my mouth shut until then.

And, by the mysterious and tangled workings of the internets, I’ve reconnected with a long-lost friend from days of yore, and that’s just nifty.

books, holidays, pycon, python, thanksgiving