Ping

I'm still alive, just so you know.

LISP Contest

The past little while has seen me refine my entry to the Lisp In Summer Projects contest. You can find the code here, in case you'd like to keep an eye on progress, but it's not playable yet, and I don't want to talk about it until I've at least ironed out some of the big questions. Don't worry, I'm keeping a journal, so you'll see all the gory details rather than just a finished product, but I want to have a product before I show it off. On a related note, I've been told that there's a local Bento-based group called Games With Friends that regularly tests tabletop card and board games in meatspace. I'm seriously considering dropping by, both before and after I get a working system together.

Work

I've started my new job, and it's fun so far. On a scale of 1 to 10, the levels of paranoia and bureaucracy here are Dilbert, and apparently that's all I'll be able to tell you. Not that I ever blogged about the actual systems I was working on at my old job, but we're going to be doing some very interesting things here[1] and I was looking forward to being able to talk about them. I won't though; anything past what I've already said could compromise some of my employers' IP, or at least run a significant risk of doing so, and no offense, but that risk isn't worth it for the sake of a hobby blog. So that's that.

• We're doing R&D work
• It involves embedded systems
• It's very interesting
• Lots of the locals are severely, sometimes paralyzingly, paranoid about security
• It's sometimes necessary to requisition a requisition-form-requisition form

...and you won't hear anything else about what I'm working on at work until I start working somewhere else.

Fiction

I just finished reading Neptune's Brood by Charlie Stross, which can best be thumbnailed as "Accountants In Spaaaaace!", and it was an excellent read. This is the sort of stuff I go to Stross for; not the usual Star-Wars-esque naval battles in 3 dimensions, but a hard look at what space battles would actually look like in the absence of hand-waivium and plottite. I'm not sure how sympathetic the characters are since I'm a lousy judge of these things[2], but the world and in particular its finance system is constructed in such a way as to make space-colonization by humans[3] plausible both in the physics and economics senses. The societal implications about our deep future are less than encouraging, but I don't want to spoiler any part of this before anyone reading this has likely gotten a chance to read it. I got the hard-back through an Amazon pre-order, but you can probably walk into your local Chapters and just pick up a fresh one by this point.

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Footnotes

1 - [back] - Well, by my definition of "very" and "interesting" at any rate.

2 - [back] - I thought the crew of Blindsight was very well thought out and understandable in the human sense, only to find out that the author had gotten feedback about how un-cuddly they were. That's another very interesting piece of non-hand-wavium sci-fi that I can recommend, by the way. Easily the best vampire story I've ever read.

3 - [back] - Or at least post-humans.