So.
Had a meeting with team lead and project manager where we discussed my job description and our plan for fulfilling my role after I leave. I have been pushing for such a meeting for a year. Project manager decided that although we have known at least two years in advance of the impeding knowledge/skill lose, there is nothing we can do in time for January 2008. Thus, complexity developed in more than a hundred man years and deployed in an increasing number of sites is going to be maintained by two people. I predict that in three years, the systems will be completely non-maintained, as just the training required will demand more man-hours than the project will be able to supply. A year later, the next version write-from-scratch will be initiated by the clients. I cannot express how demoralizing that is.
I have begun to think about what I want to do when I grow up. Turning twenty-two and all that. I don't think I want to go to college at twenty-four, though I guess I could work part-time. I don't want to be a Dilbert in some job in an organization that is run like the IDF's main IT unit, with incompetent nincompoops in charge of dispassionate developers. I don't know what role to apply for, as I'm kind of a jack of all trades and a master of none, due to me being the only technically inclined person in a fifteen-person team of bloody software developers. I could say I'm a dotNET code monkey, or an Oracle Sla^H^H^HDBA, or a C coder. I could probably pass for a Java or C++ entry-level developer, but God I hate that stuff. I don't know if there's any work in Python or Ruby that is not research. I don't know where people do serious client-side AJAX code. I don't know if I have enough experience in any one field to get hired as a specialist and I don't know if I want to continue to be a "does everything" guy and whether such jobs exist.
I've read some reviews of the new nVidia chip. I don't even get the "I wanna!" feeling anymore.
I've read about the plans for Mozilla 2, Macromedia/Adobe's generous gift of a JS2 JIT compiler, the gfx backend work. Very nice. Might make JavaScript a viable platform some day, like I keep telling people. Though making Cairo fast enough sounds impossible to me.
After reading a lot of bug reports/whining, I've managed to figure out that portage didn't cause the recompile of Mesa, xorg-server, xf86-driver-ati and Beryl when it updated glproto on my machine, and after waiting for all that stuff to compile Beryl works fine. I have to say that looking at it on your own computer rather than a flash movie is more impressive, especially considering what a puny computer that is. I won't keep it, but it really is pretty.
Have been exploring GoogleEarth and showing it to my parents. They were impressed. I wish to thank Google for compiling it for Linux - works like a charm, though Beryl still has some issues with it. It's quite amazing. My parents were especially impressed with Diego Garcia and showing me that home I spent the first two years of my life in, not with the rich metadata available for civilized countries (sadly Israel isn't).
A long time ago, a friend of Elizabeth suggested I read the Left Behind series. I politely refused, saying I won't read it for the same reason I won't read C.S.Lewis. It was four years ago, I think. They appeared to be quite bewildered, and I didn't want to say it sounded like evangelizing to me. Anyway... this story is just crazy enough to be true. And I'm not miffed because I'm Jewish, but because I'm sane.
xkcd.com is often funny.
Science fiction was unbelievably chauvinistic, untill... I don't know. Apart from LMB, it might still be chauvinistic as far as I know. And boys grew up on that shit.
fanficauthors.net is crack.
I forget what else I wanted to blog about.
