(no subject)

Janet Hardy tonight. It's good.

Got the ChannelD for the MUDLib mostly done. That still means nothing to folks. I'm happy about it. My Friday and Saturday evening are accounted for this week, but Saturday during the day I could work on the MUDLib. Or finally bottle the mead. Or, now that I've got CDs, upgrade my copy of Red Hat on the new machine. I should get it going with a 2.4-series Linux kernel and rip a stack of CDs I've got sitting and waiting.

So much to do, so little I really care about. The MUDLib's the best contender in that sense, but right now I'm in a mood where long-deferred gratification doesn't hold much promise. The problem with being basically satisfied with everything is how little room that leaves for feeling better than usual.
My broker's not returning my calls, which is especially odd given that my most recent plans required more information as part of putting more money into the account. If he was going to skip town, it'd be kind of an odd time. *I* have a broker. Shit. How Silicon Valley am I?

I've got a chunk of money burning a hole in my account. Some of it gets invested. I've convinced myself that some should turn into a volley of gifts for the siblings at home -- copies of the excellent moldmaking and maskmaking books I got recently, and some raw materials like latex and plasticine. Tim will certainly appreciate it, and I strongly suspect Ben and Seth will, too.

I need to cast a dragon. I have the mold, I just need to get stuff together to pour. Maybe I could do that on Saturday. It'd be good.

(no subject)

I work in Silicon Valley. Software is a vital part of almost everything that gets done here. Everybody needs to do it. It's as widespread as, say, fabricating parts out of hard plastic is in the toy industry.

And everybody's build system is utterly fucked. Not, like, a few people's here and there. At every place I've worked the answer to the question "I want to start a new project -- how?" is very long and nowhere in it is "check the documentation". Not only is it word of mouth, it's *faulty* word of mouth and the short answer is "try stuff until something seems to work".

Are build systems really that hard? I mean, what's up with that? Yeah, okay, they're nontrivial. But so's compiling a source file, and that mostly works. So's source control (aka revision control aka configuration management), and *that* mostly works.

I'm going ahead and getting the O'Reilly book on Make for my own use. It's how I set up projects at home, it works, it's not fucked. It required many hours of my time to figure out *how* to do it and it's certainly not the "one true way" of configuration in the long term. But after this many jobs of Visual Studio Hell, it starts to look pretty damn attractive. "I don't want to learn Make, it's too hard" pales in comparison to trying to get a new project set up and running in Visual Studio. It's just evil, evil, evil.