Suffering the sore throat of a post-nasal drip, I stayed home yesterday to cook for myself and not be sitting in a chair all day, but felt a bit better today and went in. We had a 2-hour meeting that went over (I left after an extra 30 minutes, which is a nice pattern I'm finding at this job), but it was highly productive, though not about the things my co-worker wanted to talk about. But a 2-hour meeting that didn't completely suck...I think I've had one of those, ever.

I'm settling in there, starting to understand how the systems are put together. The code is awful, but strangely enough the design is pretty solid. I'm assigned to the clustered computing code--a notoriously tricky thing to do correctly--and having finally grokked the design today, I'm fairly impressed. The director (though she currently has no minions), this slightly off-kilter, energetic young woman engineer who much prefers to write code, has been urging me to consider alternative implementations, so I finally shot her several reasoned paragraphs with background information about what's possible right now and likely in the future. Primarily I'm focused on changing our revision control system, setting up a build system, and doing general code cleanup, like deleting the dozens of files that don't appear to be used. Once we clean up the cluster code, then we can understand what it does, and then we can decide if we want to throw it out or morph it into something else.

Anyway. This is what I do for a living. I'm really good at it.

I'm feeling sort of overscheduled this month. If something doesn't settle down, I'll start siphoning some energy away from Zen stuff, and rebalance toward aikido and slacking.