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Brave New WorldI'm back! Yeah, it's been two weeks since I last wrote. Well, I've been on vacation. I took my annual trip to Madison to go to WisCon and then hung around for a week to visit friends and read and relax. I typically don't announce my vacations in my journal, since I figure it's not a good idea to announce to the whole world when I'll be gone. So from time to time I will just disappear from the on-line world. You could join my notify list in case I send out anything before or during my trip... sometime I do, although in this case I was too busy being a slug to do so. (Heck, I'd meant to write entries while I was away, and never got to it!) Anyway, I do plan to go back and write two or three entries on my trip, perhaps this weekend. So stay tuned.
 I got back into town yesterday, after an uneventful plane trip back. Flying westwards is always easier than eastwards, since the time zone differential is in your favor: You can leave in the early afternoon and arrive in the early evening. Nonetheless, I was tired as I usually am after a long trip. Of course, these days I can read pretty solidly on a long trip, so it actually went pretty quickly. Have I mentioned that I'm a demon unpacker? I had my suitcases unpacked and nearly everything put away by the time I went to bed. I hate having stuff sitting in boxes (or in suitcases), or not where it's supposed to be when I know exactly where it is supposed to be. Most of the random junk sitting around my apartment is stuff I'm either using, or that I have "plans" for (usually plans to read, or respond to in some way). I'm not a total neat-freak, but I'm pretty clean. Well, except for the whole vacuuming-and-dusting thing. I'm pretty lazy about that. The cats were delighted to see me. They weren't all over me as much as they often are after a vacation, and indeed Jefferson snubbed me a little bit (usually it's Newton who's mad at me for being gone). But we made up, and I fed them and gave them treats and petted them good. They both snoozed with me as always. So all is back to normal in their little kitty lives. Thanks, by the way, to Trish and Tom for watching them in my absence, and additionally to Trish for dropping me off and picking me up at the airport!
Today, of course, meant going in to work and catching up on everything I'd missed in the week and a half I'd been gone. But it also meant moving across campus to my new job on Project Builder! My stuff got moved over to my new office yesterday, and I unpacked everything and set up my new home-away-from-home. (Have I mentioned that I'm a demon when it comes to unpacking?) I met with members of my new team, went to lunch with them, and discussed how to get started working on the product. I'm going to be a "build engineer", which means I'll be responsible for many elements of the product's build system, and perhaps less so with the user interface itself. But I'll still get to do at least some work in the UI, and plenty with the class structures under the hood. It should be interesting work. (And I still have this sneaking suspicion that there's enough work to do that if something really needs to get done, the fact that I'm strictly in a "build engineer" position wouldn't impede the work from going to me if necessary.) Although I'm familiar with many bits of Project Builder already, there's still going to be a lot to learn. It's a big product, and many pieces I haven't plumbed the code of. So there will be some spin-up as I learn things I need to know. But I think I learned some things from joining Apple two years ago about starting on a new product, and I'm confident I'll be happily coding away comfortably a month or so from now.
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