Holy crap: the RIAA has produced a video with the National District Attorneys Association, explaining to local prosecutors that they should go after music pirates--people like you, me, your children, nieces, cousins, and grandchildren, since the RIAA has paid off Congress to make even the best of us into criminals--because it oftens goes along with other crimes like drugs and murder, and music piracy can serve as probable cause for a big drug bust! Law enforcement always seems to chafe under that pesky Fourth Amendment, so I'm sure they'll love it, for the most part. But man. It's just...lies. Not even good lies. But people will believe it.

In other news, I got pretty thoroughly thrashed in class last night. Thrashing is just being pushed up to, and probably a bit past, your limits of endurance. I did two randori (multi-person attacks) and took falls in...four more? five? I lost track. There's a thing we do, apparently called a "grinder", where you have three people attack a fourth, have everyone sit down, have a different three attack the fourth, and so on until everyone has had a turn. At some point in your thrashing, your muscles run out of energy, so there's no strength left, and you wind up moving just on determination, which means that (a) you're pretty floppy and relaxed, and (b) if you don't time and place your movements properly, you're going to get bowled over. It was a good time. (Oh, and then I took falls after class for a woman who's testing in March.)

I'm going to need the social contact of a job soon: I'm starting to feel the effects of being around by myself all the time without any real responsibilities. I have my second call with Google today, and I'd like to see what they do, but otherwise I will probably go back to my old company with a proposal for them to hire me. That takes some interesting thinking, about what kind of position would work for me in that nutcase culture, and how to deal with the Architect. (I think his position is weakened a bit since he bypassed a year-long evaluation process to spend $500,000 on software the evaluation ruled out and which turns out to have some critical flaws, but he is still there and still smoking crack.) That would certainly be the easiest thing, as I look toward diverging from software engineering sometime in the next couple of years.