Another day, another release. We're trying to hire a release engineer, but people keep scorning us for reasons I know not. Perhaps the extremely casual atmosphere here scares them? It seems like a plus to me. Anyway, after many delays I have successfully built and released, and even got my own bugfixes in. Pretty nifty.

When I stop and think about it, work is pretty weird. I'm currently wearing four hats -- programmer, release engineer, QA person, and sysadmin. Many of these hats are only worn for a few minutes each day, but the rapid quickchange between them -- fix a bug, start release, clean up diskspace, test someone else's bugfix, continue release, answer webserver question... it makes my head spin. I look forward to that day in the (hopefully near) future when I'm able to focus on coding again. It'll be a nice change.

What is there in my life other than work? Jim and I plan to rent movies tomorrow night; he still hasn't seen The Truman Show, and I want to see Ever After now that I've seen a preview for it. Gaming happened last night and was reasonably amusing, and it was nice to see everyone. Jeremy got Thai food, and I was worried it'd upset my stomach (sometimes it does), but it ended up being really yummy.

I've been working too much to do Hebrew this week, but hopefully next week we'll find the time. We've almost finished the first book -- at this point we have all the letters, and just have a chapter of weird vowel combinations and lots of reading practise left. The new book is without vowels, which is how Hebrew is normally written, and I'm really interested in what it'll be like to make that transition. Probably confusing.

Buffy, the Vampire Slayer was amusing this week, being a spotlight on Xander, the hapless male sidekick who is angstful because everyone but him has something 'useful' (read: bizarre and supernatural) to add to the vampire killing business, whereas he's just a cheerful, goofy guy. Felicity was also amusing -- the more I see of that show the more I like it, probably for the same reason that I still read YA 'dramas'. This last episode was only halfway through the season, luckily, so there's plenty more left.

I remember writing two years ago (well, May of 1997 -- and I can't believe I've been doing this journal with some vague consistency for nearly two years) that I was afraid of starting to watch Buffy, because I didn't want to be the sort of person for whom TV was important. It amazes me how much I used to define my life by negatives -- the things I had to avoid doing, so as not to become one of Them! Growing up I spent a lot of time and energy hating Them, whoever they were. This, I think, was because in some areas I had no positive role models, so instead my ideal was to be not-Them. Two years ago I was carrying a lot of that with me, and it really limited the ways I'd let myself have fun. I'm still not altogether over it, but I feel like I've made significant progress. I think I usually catch myself now when I'm avoiding something I really want to do because it's too Them-like. Like enjoying TV.

This is probably too oblique to make sense, mostly because I'm just now figuring it out myself. Sorry about that.