Weekend Update

Three things to report:

My son and I played three games this weekend. The first was one called Heroscape, and it was the most age-appropriate of the three (we played the "simple" version). I won, but just barely. The second was Dungeons and Dragons Miatures. ...The rules were a little too hard, but he did quite well. And I have to admit: he was faster than I was with the math! He kicked my butt. The third was Star Wars Miatures. He mauled me.

Anyway, this is newsworthy only because I've long felt guilt about not spending enough time "playing" with my son. This was a good start. I have to say I was impressed... he lost the first game very gracefully, he learned the rules fairly quickly, and he didn't do anything overtly "stupid", tactically speaking. He did get overly excited about the game, especially the last one, where he was really wiping the floor with me. ...but that's him: he can't sit still and can't stop talking. ; )

I had a medical "slip" this past week. Last week, the doctor upped my dosage of Levothyroxine from 100 micrograms to 125. ...I had been having these occasional episodes of lightheadedness and chest "weirdness", that I couldn't quite describe. After the dosage changed, I started having them all the time. (Well, okay, several times an hour.) I noticed that if I took my pulse while these were happening, my heart-rate was all screwy. So I looked up cardiac arhythmia on Wikipedia and, lo and behold, this is a symptom of hyperthyroidism.

But it didn't stop there. Since I work with a dozen pharmacists, I asked around about it. I also work with six people who either have a thyroid imbalance or their spouse does... and I learned that the way my doctor was giving me my medication was prone to heart palplitations: this is why people normally start at very low levels of thyroxine and titrate up to the levels they need.

Anyway, I called the doctor--we was out--but another doctor at the office told me to go back to 100 micrograms, and to make an appointment for when my regular doctor gets back. I did both. The heart palpitations are completely gone now (three days later). All is well again.

It looks like I really will be using ruby at work! On Thursday, I had a meeting with all the other programmers about a new web-project that the center will be doing, and I argued for heavy use of Ajax. I showed my own code as an example--they were all very impressed--and then I showed the programmer who will head the new project how I was accomplishing it with Cold Fusion. I went on to explain a lot of the leg-work I was doing in CF was built-in to Ruby on Rails, and he was totally sold. We will pilot Rails next week, doing some pair-programming.

Not only that, but the center's lead deveopler asked me to schedule some sessions with the other programmers to teach them Ruby (and Rails), so we can all add it to our arsenal.

(I don't know if I logged this or not, but we recently switched from Visual Basic to C#, and have started pair-programming in it: it's insanely fun. Ruby will only be an improvement.)

With RubyCLR coming to maturity, and Ruby in Steel another option, I can't think of any reason why we wouldn't use it. A lot.

The lead programmer and I have already been joking about using IronPython (their main site isn't up at the moment). I wouldn't mind that. ...Though I admit, I've got a bias for Ruby at the moment. ;)

Perl is beautiful, and I will always love it... but I have come to admore "real" OO programming, and while it's possible in Perl... it's hackish.

Perl 6, of course, will be a god-send. ...But I am not holding my breath.

Ruby is, IMO, currently the most ideal scripting language. Java's bulky, and C# is... well... Microsofty (but I do enjoy it). C++ still reigns supreme in terms of speed and capability... but I'm a high-level programmer. ...But, most importantly, Ruby is fun, and has an amazing community. And Rails is pretty slick. : )