Bookshelf:

Recently Read and Reviewed:

• Neil Gaiman, American Gods

Currently Reading:

• Vernor Vinge et. al., True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier

Next Up:

1. Joanna Russ, The Female Man
2. Julian May, Jack the Bodiless
3. A. K. Dewdney, The Planiverse
4. Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers
5. Lisa Carey, In the Country of the Young
6. Guy Gavriel Kay, Tigana
7. Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life
8. Howard V. Hendrix, Empty Cities of the Full Moon
9. Tony Daniel, Metaplanetary
10. Yogesh Chadha, Gandhi: A Life

Meeting Week

Since we've mostly finished our work for our current release, this week at work was Meeting Week. We had 2-hour meetings each of Monday through Thursday, another 1-hour meeting on Tuesday, plus I had my one-to-one with my boss on Tuesday. Whew! And we've got two meetings lined up for Monday, yet!

The occasion is that we're doing planning, both for our next release and for the long term. It's a necessary thing, but boy, meetings are tiring! They're probably the largest reason that I'm not sure I'd ever be cut out for management (well, that and the fact that I'm basically happiest when I'm programming). Some people have occasionally said they think I'd make a pretty decent manager. Could be. But I digress.

Despite all these meetings, I did manage to put in a bunch of bug fixes, including a couple of ones which turned out to be more vexing than originally expected. Which made solving the problems feel even more rewarding.

My off-time has been fun, too. I've been happily (more-or-less) waking up at 6:30 and either going to the gym early, or spending time working in the garden and then going to the bagel shop to read before work. In the evenings I've been doing more reading, petting the cats, gaming at Subrata's, and getting together last night for dinner with Trish, whom I haven't seen in quite a while.

(Trish, by the way, says she's going to write a journal entry every day during July. By which I hope she doesn't mean little wussy entries in her LiveJournal. But maybe she does. She only made this pledge because I was giving her shit for writing so rarely. I'm just telling you this to get her goat. But I'll be impressed if she pulls it off!)

Going to the gym this morning was kind of annoying. The gym usually plays a rotation of songs on iTunes, which is fine. But this morning they were playing the rotation from hell.

The problem, basically, is that every third song was by The Offspring. I hate The Offspring. They can't sing, can't play, can't carry a tune, play astoundingly simple and unchallenging songs (and play them badly), and basically have no discernable redeeming features. Hearing them once in a morning is enough to dampen my morning, but six times? Guh. The rotation was also liberally mixed with Green Day (who at their best are barely listenable) and some other modern schlock-punk bands. Aargh. I complained both in person and left a comment in their suggestion box (the latter of which was rather snarky since I was getting pretty annoyed by that point).

I know this is more text than this matter really deserves. But geez.

Debbi gets back tomorrow. Yay! She's been teasing me in e-mail all week about whether I miss her. I do miss her, but not (I think) in the same way (or at least to the same degree) that she seems to miss me. I'm kind of stoic and/or self-absorbed in that way, and I can easily keep myself entertained for a week on my own.

On the other hand, I was leaving work today and trying to figure out what to do for the evening, it's being Friday night and all, and I realized that keeping myself entertained on my own perpetually gets to be a drag. And even though being involved means a lot of negotiation (which is not always a bed of roses itself), having someone to do stuff with just because we like to be together is a Good Thing.

Didja notice that Amazon lowered the threshold for their Super-Saver shipping? You only need to order $50.00 worth of (qualifying) stuff now to get free shipping. I think I'll place me an order this weekend...