Saturday, January 2, 2016

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  It was a high-delta day today in our household. 

First, Debbie is feeling much better (thanks for the good wishes, all who wrote!).  Her cough is greatly reduced, and she doesn't look sick any more.  Her voice sounds normal, too.  That's a delta on the plus side.

Two of our cats needed to visit the vet today, though.  Both of them have urinary tract infections (UTIs) – that's the fifth and sixth, if I'm counting correctly, since we moved up here.  The vet (and everything I've read) swears that UTIs are not infectious.  With cats as isolated and coddled as ours, you'd think UTIs would be unlikely.  Tell that to our poor cats!  That's a delta on the minus side.

I spent the day working on some programming, mainly on a fairly complicated state machine tracking the state of one process from another process, using UDP messages encoded in JSON.  I brought all the plumbing for that up from scratch in about 8 hour of programming.  Speaking as an ancient and venerable assembly language programmer, it's just amazing how productive one can be in a modern high level language like Java, with the bazillions of free, high quality, open-source libraries available.  I have exactly one programming tool that I had to pay for (IntelliJ's IDEA) – and that only because I'm a fussy, lazy sort when it comes to my IDE.  If I was forced to use NetBeans or Eclipse, I'm pretty sure I'd survive.  What a different world it is today for programmers, compared with my beginnings in the early '70s, when even assemblers were expensive, proprietary, and lousy :)

One hardly knows what to say...

One hardly knows what to say...  The Red Army Choir and the Leningrad Cowboys, singing Sweet Home Alabama.  Not quite Lynard Skynard, but certainly much better than I'd have guessed...