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Well, I am now officially a developer again! It's kind of weird because it doesn't feel very like work yet - I've got used to seeing getting the chance to tinker around with code as a leisure only activity. I have a very flash set up with lots of monitors and a nice surface laptop with a stylus that I can make notes on and so forth, which I'm quite liking in a weird way. The current project I'm working on has a weird wrinkle where every time you build it, the first load of the website takes about 90 seconds, which is rather irritating, but I am filling with doing things like this post on another screen so isn't too bad. I feel like I'm picking things up again, which is good, although it's hard to tell if I'm doing it faster or slower than they were expecting but overall, I feel pretty positive about how things are working out and it's definitely leaving me with a whole lot more brain space than teaching! In the evenings this week so far, I have been out to the FMs to do some co-op gaming and finished off the book group book in time to head out for book group this evening and still been able to get in and get started in the morning every morning, which feels like a pretty good record!
Speaking of book group, this month's book was Gnomon by Nick Harkaway, which proved to be an interesting read. Contrary to
coalescent's skeptical look, I would have managed it over the weekend if I hadn't had a horrible cold and thus spent all of Saturday on the sofa feeling drowsy and bunged up and watching dumb TV. I managed the rest of it over Sunday afternoon and evening and Tuesday evening, although I will admit it is a pretty hefty proposition, so I can see why he was inclined to side-eye me. I ended up enjoying it much more than I was expecting to. I noped out of The Gone-Away World pretty hard, which left me with a definite instinct that Harkaway was a writer I wouldn't enjoy. This meant that for at least the first third of the book, I was reading it feeling rather resistant to and almost resentful of the fact that I was rather impressed by it - I kept waiting for it to tip over into being too pretentious or all-over-the-place. For me, it never quite did, although it came close a couple of times, which put me in the interesting position of having an experience not entirely unlike that of the Inspector. I found myself speculating at about 80% of the way through whether Harkaway had done the same OU philosophy course as me, but looking at his bio, I guess he must have just included a similar module in his Cambridge degree. I might re-read the end as it felt like it didn't quite hang together as tightly as the middle portion of the book, but generally, I really did enjoy it quite a bit. Perhaps I should even try some of his other stuff again?
Speaking of book group, this month's book was Gnomon by Nick Harkaway, which proved to be an interesting read. Contrary to
coalescent's skeptical look, I would have managed it over the weekend if I hadn't had a horrible cold and thus spent all of Saturday on the sofa feeling drowsy and bunged up and watching dumb TV. I managed the rest of it over Sunday afternoon and evening and Tuesday evening, although I will admit it is a pretty hefty proposition, so I can see why he was inclined to side-eye me. I ended up enjoying it much more than I was expecting to. I noped out of The Gone-Away World pretty hard, which left me with a definite instinct that Harkaway was a writer I wouldn't enjoy. This meant that for at least the first third of the book, I was reading it feeling rather resistant to and almost resentful of the fact that I was rather impressed by it - I kept waiting for it to tip over into being too pretentious or all-over-the-place. For me, it never quite did, although it came close a couple of times, which put me in the interesting position of having an experience not entirely unlike that of the Inspector. I found myself speculating at about 80% of the way through whether Harkaway had done the same OU philosophy course as me, but looking at his bio, I guess he must have just included a similar module in his Cambridge degree. I might re-read the end as it felt like it didn't quite hang together as tightly as the middle portion of the book, but generally, I really did enjoy it quite a bit. Perhaps I should even try some of his other stuff again?