Just finished THE GLASS BEAD GAME, Herman Hesse's last novel. It was an awesome display of imagination. Hesse intended it as a parody of biographies, but he did it a bit too well. Don't read the introduction till after you read the book.
I finally got through a stalled scene in the novel. I had to balance the main character's dislike for guns with his perceived need to be carrying one. I think it worked.
The first of the Ruby books arrived yesterday. I've been able to work through the main problems I was having. Now I'm rewriting the wrestling schedule admin program, and embarked on an ambitious car racing schedule program. I've added the first draft of the output to the racing section.
I'm plowing through the two Ruby books at home and at work I'm learning vbscript, Active Directory and Open Deploy. My geek runeth over. It's nice to be excited about programming again but I think I'm over-doing it.
Only got out 500 words this week. The geeking has worn me out some and Tonya was having a bad morning so she needed attention. I've decided to cut back on the geeking and refocus on the writing. Programming doesn't take the energy that writing does, but it also has shallower rewards.
People who have no idea who I am or what I do telling me what they want me to be. No thanks.
Got a reject letter today. It's been a while. I've been so busy with the novel that I haven't submitted much lately. And of course the previous submission was actually accepted. Ah well. You can't win them all. Besides, the rejected story is already in an envelope to be mailed tomorrow to another journal.
Finished the second version of my car racing schedule program. It's going well. It's a mix of AJAX and Ruby, my two favorite new technologies.
Wrote 1500 words this morning and the action is picking up again. It got a bit talky for a while there. Ah well, that's what rewrites are for.
For that last for days I've done nothing productive. Yee Haw!
One of the big buzwords I've been hearing for a while is "Agile Programming." Today I read an article which actually explained what that is suppossed to mean. Turns out that I've been an "Agile Programmer" since the mid 80's. It's nice to know I had it right all those years. Of course it might just be that people my age are now comming into control of things, so maybe programming methodolgy, like history, is written by the winners.