Rui Carmo
So here I am for the next few days, blissfully ignorant of whatever might be happening back at the office - and, for a change, intending to stay that way for the next three weeks.
Time has so far been spent sunning (moderately), reading (a lot), and messing about with IPython when the sun's too hot to go outside.
A lot of people go on vacation to relax and do absolutely nothing - me, I go on vacation to relax, sure, by thinking (a trait of mine which, sadly, is woefully underused in corporate life) and tinkering with technology in a whimsical fashion (one that is used, but not valued - or worth a damn - there).
At the moment, I'm pursuing (roughly in parallel) several extremely relaxing lines of thought regarding a bunch of stuff that has been on my mind for ages now but that I haven't been able to investigate (or do much about), of which I can highlight, off the top of my head:
- Revamping my approach at replacing Yojimbo with IMAP by adding naïve CSS parsing to the script I posted some weeks back.
- Listening to Mandarin courses whenever my 2G iPod feels like working for more than half an hour at a time.
- Coding a Snakelets-inspired plugin mechanism for newspipe.
- Reading up on business strategy and trying to figure out exactly where it fits in in my work.
- Drafting HTML mock-ups of what I expect my next Wiki to look like.
- Looking at how telecoms has been changing over the past five years and trying to divine what it will really be like over the next two.
- Breaking apart some iSync 2.3 plugins and figuring out what makes them tick (so that I may, someday, update my HOWTO on the blasted things).
- Pondering my upcoming 35th birthday and exactly what sort of career I should try to build for myself henceforth, considering that a bunch of my friends are already spread across Europe, having moved away from what pfig once referred to (alegorically) as "that cesspool of incompetence by the sea" - his actual words were unprintable, and he's since highlighted that it wasn't incompetence per se, but rather an utter lack of awareness regarding the finer details of civilization that drove him away from Portugal.
All in all, there's lots of fun to be had on vacation. And I did bring my camera along, too.
Update Incidentally, Python 2.5 is just out. Hopefully, it will make its way into Leopard, saving us Mac users the hassle of installing third-party builds.