I got a job offer, rather a nice one, from this company in San Mateo that I interviewed with. They're a bit odd for a variety of reasons, but the first thing one notices is that they're what I call a Startup Revenant: the company started, and for some reason, everybody quit, and a skeleton crew (in this case it seems to have been the founders plus the chief scientist) hired new staff and secured more funding. The current crew seems to be nice and mellow and pretty sharp, though.

Good Things:

• it's in Perl, my favorite language, which I'm not quite ready to leave if I don't have to.
• 10 minutes from home.
• hands-on experience with large (40-100 terabytes) data storage and computation.
• well-paid.
• lots of hard stuff to chime in on.
• folks seem dedicated to making work be fun.
• at least 18 months of funding.
• pretty good chance at success.
• co-worker (there's only one guy I'd be working with directly, for the most part) is friendly and clueful.
• accepting of my desire to take a week off in June and 3 weeks in July.

• much of the Perl is mediocre to really awful (though I think that's how my last boss first inherited the code he passed down to me).
• about a year ago, everybody quit or was fired.
• boss (VPEng) is nice in a disturbingly New Age way I'll need to learn to work with. in a way he seems to lack sarcasm which is not a conversational style I can sustain. (but we've also only met in an interview/job search context.)
• hopes/expectations for me are high.
• not as freaky as Danger.

For Easter, I'm finishing Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus, a nice readable description of why all our Bible translations are bad (though he puts it in much more interesting wording). I first heard of him in his Fresh Air interview, and I recommend it, since he's an engaging speaker and writer with an interesting personal story. It also has the phrase "periblepsis occasioned by homoeoteleuton" in it, which is absolutely wonderful, but he's making a joke and only uses the words a few times.