After a lovely coffeedate last night, there was a less successful one this afternoon: pleasant, but not much of a connection. It makes me appreciate the specialness of the connections I do have. While I was in the neighborhood, I dropped off flowers and chocolate for a friend who I hope will be pleasantly surprised.

Most of today I spent getting back to learning Erlang. In particular, I realized I needed to write some code--there's no other way to actually learn a programming language--so I spent over an hour writing a trivial program to find the minimum of a list of numbers. This would take about 5-10 minutes in any normal language like the others we all know, but Erlang is fundamentally different. It has many concepts I've ecountered before, but every time I've ventured into those languages (the technical terms, though you don't care, are "functional programming" and having "tail-recursive list processing" as one of the primary ways of doing stuff...man, I think it's a testament to my self-development that I know all this crap and I still get to have sex with girls) the habitual part of my brain says "Wait, no, that can't possibly be how it's supposed to work all the time". And of course it always is. So having done some basic programs, I'm getting into the rhythm of it, which is fun.

I've been thinking about making money again at some point. I still don't know about working at Google, which isn't decidable until an offer comes down. I do have this neat idea of a project to pitch to my old company, something I could never have been spared to do when I actually worked there. I imagine I could talk my way into that without too much trouble, so I'm just doing research and waiting to see how I feel about working again over the coming month. If I'm going to do any significant contracting, it's probably worth the hassle to incorporate, but I'll ask the accountant about that tomorrow.

Mmmm, chaos.