(no subject)
Okay, so I missed all of november, mea culpa. Still, I'm *roughly* a month from my last entry, so here goes.
Poker. Amy's sister Barb is convinced that I am a gambling addict. She's mostly kidding, and she laughs when she says it so that you'll know she's kidding, but I think if I phoned her from some atlantic city gutter, missing teeth and choking on blood and broken dreams, she would only be partly surprised. She thinks this because in the past week we've had a poker night, *and* Kevin and I took a trip to the Casino Rama poker room. That's two days of poker out of 7, but I find it hard to make myself feel bad about it since I turned $5 into $27 on Friday and $120 into $221 on Saturday. Woohoo! I've decided to put the money into a float, from which I will draw my future poker-buyins. This way poker might (if I play well on average) never take money out of my wallet again, and if the float ever gets really high (and assuming no christmas or birthday present gets there first) I might use it to buy a set of nice clay casino-style poker chips. That would rock. As for the addict idea, I dunno -- one of the dealers at Rama told us about a guy on the slot machines who got into an argument with a maintenance worker who wouldn't let him pee in the garbage can so as to avoid losing his slot machine. When I get to that point, I will accept that I am an addict. Then I will, most likely, pee myself.
Work. There's this wonderful thing in the programming world called a feature freeze, and when it comes to town it's like christmas -- the fact that this freeze showed up around christmas is just a double blessing I guess. When a feature freeze comes down, you change gears as a developer. You stop writing new code, and instead focus on testing the bejeebus out of the existing code and fixing up holes. This is a wonderful time because you invariably find a million little things but then instead of putting them off or making a mental note or glomming another postit onto your monitor (I am fond of this approach -- yellow-adhesive-paper bearing trees beware!) you actually fix it. And what's better, you use this program that tracks all the bugs so that you can actually SEE them all being resolved. Goodness me, it does give one a sense of accomplishment. Never mind that my entire department is like the e-business prototype wing, and it's possible nothing we write will ever be used, it's still nice to produce good code. I also attended a talk today on eXtreme Programming [sic] which is a cool thing that merits more thought before I make up my mind on it.
Home life is fine, and while Amy's dislike of her job puts a damper on things, the fact that she's getting out of it, and the fact that it's christmas tend to pick things back up again. Christmas is very soon though, and the unbought presents I must seek out and buy are dangling precariously above my head in a manner most threatening, so I think this weekend will be less poker, more wanton moneyspending.
So. That's about it. Poker is fun. Work is happy. Christmas is coming. That's my executive summary. Mom's new house is really great, incidentally -- I tried to express to mom just how happy I was with her change of venue, but it was basically just me saying "I am happy with your change of venue" in various and somewhat repetitive ways. Suffice it to say that I am happy with her change of venue. I've been out of touch with dad this past month and will be getting back into touch post-haste since the Nightingale christmas is not to be missed, and moreover since his birthday is even sooner. My manager wants to know where I got my nerf gun, and when someone calls me my phone moos. All in all, life is certified grade AAA spiff.