I asked Rachel where today had gone, and she pointed at my xemacs window (I used xemacs to develop, yes. It does syntax hiliting.) and said, "In there. You put time in and get code out."

Cool. Not only does my job cause time to fly, but at the end of the day I get to point to my code and say 'See! I was productive.' It's a nice feeling. I certainly feel like I'm accomplishing more as a programmer than I did as a sysadmin, although I doubt that's actually true. It's just that being a sysadmin is so interrupt-driven that it's hard to tell where your time actually goes.

So it has been a good day. I wrote code, and listened to 80's music, and ate far too many cherries. Now I'm going to go eat Thai food with Earl before he drives back to LA -- he came up for the weekend & spent today working -- and then I'll go home and slave away putting together the nice loft bed I bought at IKEA. I think it's vaguely plausible that it'll be finished by the end of Wednesday. Once it's done I can re-arrange my room, assembled the under-bed table so that I have a desk, and then finally start unpacking some of my plethora of boxes.

I spent all weekend reading Terry Pratchett books that Rachel loaned to me; Soul Music, Lords and Ladies, and Maskerade. The humor in the first of these wasa little too frantic for my tastes, although I enjoyed the serious bits immensely; latter two were very, very good indeed. I've always thought of Pratchett as a fairly fluffy writer, but some of the issues he touches on in these books (notably the difficulty of being an aging woman) are both serious & rare in genre fiction. I'm impressed. Plus he does really terrifying non-human elves. I think that ranting bits of Lords and Ladies should be required reading for anyone who is tempted to write (or roleplay) beautiful frail fair perfect Elves.

What else did I do this weekend? Saturday I slept, then gathered with a bunch of people (Earl, Gretchen, Carl, Chrisber, Marith, Jim, Eric) for fun. We went to dinner at Satsuma (sushi!), then to Renaissance Books in Palo Alto, which is (sniff!) closing down their storefront and moving entirely to web-based business. The remnants of their books were strongly priced to sell (fifty cents for paperbacks, a dollar for hardbacks), and so everyone picked through the piles and came away with huge bags of books. Most of mine were bad YA books from the early 70's, but I did find the amusing Student's Guide to the Colleges of Cambridge, circa 1903.

Sunday was Alternate, so everyone gathered at Harold's for board games. Spree was briefly played, but took too long with eight people, so things factionalised; I played the new Die Siedler expansion with Jeremy, Chris Dodd, and Seth (fifteen-yr-old staying with Chris), while others played Mythos, attempted to fly kites, or sat around being snide as their natures dictated. Seth won our game, but the rest of us were pretty close behind. I've only played the expansion twice now (once at Mike & Susan's, once Sunday), but so far I think I'm fond of it; it provides a lot more ways to get points, which seems to make the game more interesting. I'll have to see what the replay value is like.

Eep. Time to run eat dinner. It'll be nice to spend time with Earl without hordes of people around.