Silence

Introspective week.

[Now Playing: "Square Lamp" by esem... damn, what a fine track this is.]

I've been thinking a lot this week. About work, about quality, about ruby, about miniatures, about drawing... the whole shebang.

Work: I want to write more code. That's the long and the short of it. I'm weak at detail-oriented stuff, and I'm good at algorithms and problem-solving: I should be writing more code. I asked my boss about this today, and he supports the idea; we'll see where that goes. (To be honest, my experiences with such requests are usually taken quite seriously.)

Quality: I went to a local conference regarding the Bladridge criteria yesterday. I rather enjoyed it, though I would argue that I didn't learn anything, really. Rather, it was great idea-fodder, and allowed me some "blocked time" to contemplate how to make use of the criteria at work. ...I also considered working on a "personal criteria" for self-improvement.

Ruby: As I've mentioned, I've been pushing for it at work. There has been surprising support for it, and the lead programmer just asked me to try writing a web-page for a new project using ruby. ...My reflex was to say "no", because I wanted more time to learn it and discover best practices, but I think working on it would be an excellent way to explore the language. The first thing I went looking for was a DBASE-format library... and the first page I stumbled upon was an argument of why the writer had switched from ruby to python. ...And it's a recent article; a well-informed one. His reason, of course, was the robustness of the Py libraries out there.

Of course, this is something that will change with time. ...Or will it? ...I wonder if ruby will really be the last popular language. (Errr... last to rise to power, anyway.) I'm not terribly willing to write new libraries that are missing... I wonder if those who are willing are a dying breed. With the vast libraries available for Java and C++ on the low-end, and Perl and Python on the high-end... It will take a massive force of will to build ruby up to that level. I shudder to think how insurmountable an obstacle that will be for the languages of tomorrow.

Of course, MS has the weight to throw .NET out there, and the world will eat it. (Thank you, MaSter, may I have another?) But that's an exception.

Perhaps that's why DSL's are so popular these days... it's only in the small world of Doman-Specific problem sets that new languages have the ability to emerge.

Of course, the idea of "Very High Level Languages" may be the next big thing. Frameworks on steroids: programming languages built on today's languages. Imagine Rails, but without DHH's "convention over configuration" as a limitation: a meta-language smart enough to look at your database and figure out the schema.

Perhaps I've been drinking the MS water too much lately, since that sounds like "Visual Rails" to me.

Miniatures: Yes. Since playing miniatures with my son a few weeks ago, I've been contemplating building up my own collection. A lot. ...Obessing, really. I've decided to beef up my collection of Star Wars driod miniatures, and for D&D, I'm considering a "Devils and Blues" pool of minis... "blues" being Blue dragons. (The teams in D&D, called "Warbands", are alignment-specific, and blue dragons are LE, like Devils.) ...I'm also big on druids and constructs... but I can't quite come up with a Warband concept that seems solid enough to warrant investing in.

Strangely, my wife doesn't seem disturbed by this, and suggested I just build a collection over time, $20 a month or so. [shrug] I guess I will.

...I tried to stay the urge by installing Neverwinter Nights... but found it didn't scratch the itch.

Drawing: Okay, not much to say here. I've just thought about it a lot, lately. ...I haven't actually drawn much, however. ..A little. Enough to claim "I haven't stopped". But still, it's one of those frustrating situations where you know you should stop thinking and start doing... but something stops you. A Human curse.