topaz

I have the awesomest co-workers, originally uploaded by qwrrty.

Awesome:

Hilariously less awesome:

From a puzzle in the office kitchen today:

#21 down: 1. x_i ∀y - f. Or, how one traverses the Cartesian plane due north, for example

( answer )

One of my coworkers has transferred to Akamai's San Mateo office and is apartment hunting. If any of you wonderful people out there have a line on a decent apartment in a not-sketchy-neighborhood, preferably in Berkeley but whatever, drop me a line?

Current Mood: awake

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

A little unnerving to see in the office kitchen first thing in the morning.

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

Uhhhhh...

I do not think that means what you think it means.

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

They're real! They're really real!, originally uploaded by qwrrty.

SHOWERS!

At WORK!

We had a holiday party at work last week. Thomas Dolby dropped by.

That was very cool.

Current Mood: artistic

bike of the day, originally uploaded by qwrrty.

Well, trike, technically.

A friend of mine is relocating to the Boston/Cambridge area from NYC. (To become a co-worker! Yay!) Hopefully she will be moving into Mosaic in the fall but will need housing until then. It must be okay for her to bring her cat, but other than that things are negotiable.

So if anyone has a lead on an apartment or sublet in the greater Camberville area that will take a single woman with a cat for 6-9 months or so, or if you're looking for a housemate and can take cats, give me a shout so I can pass it along. She has a car so it doesn't necessarily need to be in the city proper.

Edit: This is all supposed to happen sometime between the middle of May and the middle of June.

Current Mood: excited

friday in the common with tim, originally uploaded by qwrrty.

It's a lovely day to sit in a coffee shop and drink hot cider and eat croissants and watch the rain while waiting for them to fix your alternator. Well, maybe except for that last part.

Now if only my VPN would work. Oh well. More cider?

Current Mood: bored

pi day @ akamai, originally uploaded by qwrrty.

when come back, bring PIE.

As a postscript to my previous complaint about Ruby, I received today a fantastic exploration of Ruby's closure and execution semantics, via

zsquirrelboy: http://innig.net/software/ruby/closures-in-ruby.rb. This covers some of the ground that I did but then goes much, much deeper. I have only covered about half of it and probably will not get any farther today. If you are a Ruby fan or any kind of a computer language nerd I strongly recommend that you take 30 or 40 minutes to read through it.

The upshot is: Ruby is even more fucked than I recognized. I'm an understanding guy, and would be willing to accept a lot of the language's foibles if they were well documented up front, but some of these conclusions are really damning. See section 3 in particular, especially if you think that "I thought I knew all there was to know about the 'return' statement" is a funny joke.

Ruby seems like a very interesting but ultimately unsuccessful experiment in functional language semantics, where some of the novel concepts just do not pan out. Blocks in particular are a failure: if they were just implemented as first-class closures it would solve a lot of problems, but that doesn't seem likely. A pity.

Current Mood: ornery

Highly valuable information I have learned today:

eval { foo }; is permissible syntax.
eval { foo } is not.

I want those six hours of my life back, goddamnit.

I think

omegabeth is right. This is clearly all because Mercury is in retrograde.