Traffic is not a new problem here.

I have a drop-everything assignment at work. I might not mind it, except that this fire drill, like almost all our fire drills, is to accomodate the fact that people didn't do their jobs quite as well as they should have, nine months ago. This persists despite the diplomatic efforts of several good people, and my increasingly less diplomatic comments (I can only take so much unchanging stupid shit before my politeness erodes). It's gratifying that I found the right solution quickly, but it will take me the next week to implement and test it, and I have to learn a new programming language that I wasn't particularly interested in.

On the bright side, this particular round of saving the company should remind them at review time to give me a good raise, and a title upgrade to Senior Software Engineer (redeemable for a higher salary at my next job).

One of my new hobbies is HellMOO, a sort of text-based virtual reality system run and populated by various friends. It's an environment the users can modify by programming: it's rather like the old Lisp machines in that regard. For example, in a Lisp machine, if you wanted to change the way windows behaved--you wanted double-clicking to minimize rather than maximize them--you would execute some Lisp code, and it would change the behavior of the operating system right then. None of the time-consuming processes of normal software development. In the MOO, for example, I wanted a weapon called an Electric Jitte, so I executed some code and made one.

I think I'm still recovering from a wild, crazy weekend. I spent about 7 hours on Saturday with two separate women, being sociable and engaged and stuff. I'm still tired.