Last weekend at this time, I was in Iceland. My friend and housemate Matt spent the summer there interning with CCP Games, and I decided to take a long weekend and go visit him on his last full weekend there. (CCP are the people who make EVE Online, the second most popular MMO in the world, and the forthcoming World of Darkness MMO.) Our friend (and soon-to-be housemate) Kate was also there, stopping over on her way back from London.

There were a lot of reasons for me visiting, not least that, in my twenty-five years of existence, I hadn't yet left North America, and I was starting to feel a bit provincial and more importantly a bit bored. Also, I'm a terrible tourist, but surely one can learn these things, right? Besides, it would be fun. And indeed, I had a blast.

The trip was pretty much entirely comprised of me learning the practicalities of navigating a foreign country, more or less effectively, and hanging out with Matt, Kate, and Matt's coworkers at bars, cafes, restaurants, and apartments in Reykjavik. I had lots of good and sometimes unusual food (lamb hot dogs?), I went to the Laugar geothermal pools and soaked, I watched the fireworks on the harbor for Reykjavik Culture Night, and that was pretty much it. The scenery, even just on the bus from the airport to Reykjavik in the morning, was gorgeous, all ocean and mountains and low-angled light. It was a fascinating trip.

I'd read a lot about EVE, the game Matt's company makes, in computer gaming magazines, but being a student I was really scared of getting into anything that I might be more obsessed with than school. (Hear now the archetypal story of the guy or girl who got kicked out of school because they played too much EverQuestWorld of Warcraft.) I'm no longer a student but I'm of course working, and work is very unlikely to ever be replaced as the prime sink of my time, but I feel like I need be less pathologically risk-averse now, and so I've been considering lots of different ways to spend my free time -- auditioning them, perhaps. So when Matt sat me down at his desk in Iceland and showed me around EVE a bit, I was paying attention. (Frankly I've been kind of looking for an excuse to give EVE a go.)

There are lots of reasons that EVE is interesting -- it's all a single gigantic world, rather than a bunch of parallel worlds like other MMOs; the economy is entirely player-driven; it's set in space rather than some fantasy world; yadda yadda yadda. That's not the most interesting part of EVE for me. Some background -- when I was in middle school, I was in the local equivalent of a Talented and Gifted program, because they didn't know what to do with me (a rant for another day). In eighth grade, as sort of a capstone project, we (well, I, mostly, I think) wrote a space computer game. It wasn't much better-specified than that -- I had grand visions of hopping from planet to planet, trading commodities, and maybe some space battle, and I eventually got together an interface inspired by the Star Trek computers, some basic movement, and a "market" with random prices. (I was writing this in Visual Basic, if I recall correctly; I was just discovering C and Linux. Shh, we were all fourteen and living in the boonies at the end of a crappy dialup connection once. Well, okay, some of us were.) We had a group of four or five -- a friend did some art, I don't remember if it ever got used or not; we theoretically divvied up tasks somehow, but I think I was the only one with significant programming experience. We tried to keep it going and improve it, after we'd met the (low) requirements for the TAG program, but it went the usual way of such projects. At any rate---

Friends, EVE is that game I was dreaming of. Trade, courier, mine, fight, loot -- it's all there. EVE is that middle-school space game, made by professionals. I'm not sure quite why I'm primed for those narratives so hard, but I am, and EVE hits those narrative kinks like whoa.

I may be hooked.

Now, history suggests that I may like starting games more than continuing to play them (what can I say, I just really like tutorial missions ;-), so we'll see if I come back to EVE after a week at work. But this is really kind of exciting -- perhaps the most excited I've ever been about a game after I finished the tutorial missions. It could be a wild ride. :-)

another rant for another day: why I faileddropped microecon twice, or, how how we teach economics sucks (hint: students have never interacted with a real market as either a buyer or, particularly, as a seller)

also, I have no point here, I just like to say "New Game Excitement"

Here's my review of the September 2010 issue of Asimov's, before I leave it on the plane in the hopes someone else will find it and enjoy it. (It's a good issue.)

• "Backlash", by Nancy Fulda (novelette) -- A cute time-traveling retired-spy-back-into-service story, which, unusually for the spy genre, features a reasonably accurate portrayal of said spy dealing with PTSD. (PTSD: It's not just nicely-cinematic flashbacks.)
• "The Palace in the Clouds", by Eugene Mirabelli (short story) -- Not to be confused with the cover story, Geoffrey Landis's The Sultan of the Clouds. It posits an aging steampunk Venice-of-the-sky, which makes for some gorgeous imagery, and goes from there. It's either inspired by Hayao Miyazaki, or he should totally make a movie of it, or both -- the image of a slowly-failing flying city and the main characters, a young boy and his aviator uncle, are all tailor-made for his style. As with Miyazaki, you won't find any deep philosophy here, more themes of family and growing up, but that's not a bad thing.
• "Wheat Rust", by Benjamin Crowell (novelette) -- Does a decent job at a story of a generation ship and the people who live there and their divergent cultures, and notably a story whose stakes are much smaller than The Destruction Of The Entire World^WShip! (As you might gather from the name, the main characters are trying to prevent an agrigultural plague.)
• "For Want of a Nail", by Mary Robinette Kowal (short story) -- Another generation ship story, with a bit of interesting generation ship morality, plus some AI morality. AIs used as the collective memory of families over generations.
• "The Sultan of the Clouds", by Geoffrey Landis (novella) -- Geoffrey Landiss is a NASA scientist, so he obviously does a good job with the geophysics of a colony of floating cities on Mars. Thankfully he does it without letting it overwhelm the story, which has some nice bits of character development and some interesting speculation about alternative family structures a la Heinlein.
• "The View from the Other Side: Science Fiction in Non-Western/Non-Anglophone Countries", by Aliette de Bodard (nonfiction) -- A follow-up to Norman Spinrad's obnoxious book review column I complained about back in April. It can be summarized as "why the opinions and perspectives of anyone but white men matter ever 101", and so pretty basic, but probably useful to start educating the clueless. (sigh)

Currently reading: the latest issue of Apex Magazine, Cat Valente's first as fiction editor!

I've decided to branch out into a new blog genre here at free dissociation -- cocktail blogging. Because frankly I'm a bit tired of SF short fiction reviews, even though I still have New Genre #6 and the latest Ideomancer, whatever its number is, to blather about. (Pandemonium got the September Asimov's in finally! (And the October Analog?) In the meantime I read The Art of War on my phone on the T. Make of this what you will.)

Oh yes, cocktail blogging.

So last weekend we had an Iron Blogger Champagne Brunch, instead of getting together for beer. After we tired of the usual mimosas and so on, and having skinned a fresh pineapple, I concocted this rather interesting beverage:

In a wine glass combine:

• 1 shot Hendrick's Gin
• 1 shot St. Germain Elderflower Liquer
• dry champagne

Finish by floating a wedge of fresh pineaple, and possibly garnish with another wedge stuck on the rim of the glass because it looks cool.

I was actually kind of surprised by how well it worked -- the Hendrick's is a smoother gin, but it's still got a definite juniper kick, and the St. Germain was really important to blend that flavor into the fruitiness of the champagne. And of course fresh pineapple is always awesome. I think Liz, our hostess, made her own without the St. Germain, so your mileage may vary.

At any rate, it needs a name. The constituent liquors aren't uncommon, at least around here in the craft cocktail scene, and it's not hugely complicated, so it wouldn't surprise me if somebody else has come up with it independently, but whatever. (God, did I really just write "the craft cocktail scene" unironically? That's maybe taking the whole "cocktail blogging" thing a little too far.) What should I call it?

On the other end of the drink spectrum from alcohol, we made our first batch of carbonated iced coffee last night. A friend of mine got tired of paying for seltzer and so bought his own CO2 cylinder and fittings, and so of course the neighborhood has subsequently been trying to come up with interesting things to carbonate. Last night's experiment was:

• 2/3 of a bag of old Dunkin' Decaf I had lying around (about 2 C dry), cold-brewed with 14 or so C water for 24 hours
• 1/2 C sugar

Gas solubility in water goes up pretty much right until you hit freezing, so you want your liquid as cold as possible, and the coffee was pretty strong, so I put a couple dozen ice cubes in it and shook them around to equilibrate the temperature before pouring the coffee into a 2L soda bottle and giving it to my friend, who sealed it up, attached it to the CO2 cylinder, and shook it vigorously for about a minute. The coffee took the carbonation really well, the ratio of sugar to coffee was pretty exactly right to offset the acidity imparted by the carbonation, and everyone present was sufficiently weirded out by it that I don't think it will become an overnight commercial sensation. Oh well. I like it. It's really quite tasty!

So I have a liter of carbonated coffee which is coming with me to work tomorrow, because I've got a long week ahead of me and being up this late isn't a great start to it. (Yes it's decaf, but my caffeine tolerance is low, to say nothing of the other alkaloids present that decaffeination doesn't touch.) Plus a second brewing of the grounds sitting in the fridge which I haven't decided whether I'll ask Mark to carbonate or not. Isn't science great? :-)

Speaking of being up too late, laundry's done! disappears

I should be going to bed, and I also should have posted earlier, but such is life. A quick review of the latest issue of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, a small but well-regarded magazine published by Small Beer Press of Easthampton, Massachusetts (aka Kelly Link and Gavin Grant), the people who are putting out the new trade paper edition of Ted Chiang's brilliant Stories of Your Life and Others this October. Both Pandemonium and Porter Square Books sell it in hardcopy, or you can get it electronically for not-much money. I think it is consistently the best SF magazine I read, the magazine most likely to give me stories that I like, that I find well-written, that make me think, that discomfort me in a useful way. This latest issue is no exception.

• "A City of Museums", by Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud (translated by Edward Gauvin) -- Châteaureynaud is a French writer, and this story was written in 1983 but only translated recently; Gauvin has a collection of Châteaureynaud's works in translation (coming?) out from Small Beer Press. It's an odd little story about a city which is made up entirely of museums, and about the "rats" who live in cracks writing, creating art, in the hopes that one day their hideout too will become a museum ("see 'the bed where the author of Sylvie’s Baubles had once lain in state'!") A bit about how artists hope to be remembered, what purpose the creation of art serves and what purpose the memorialization of art serves.
• "Dear Aunt Gwenda" -- a cute little pseudo-advice column.
• "Fire-Marrow", by Jennifer Linnaea -- a blind man lives by a subterranean river, his only contact with the outside world the toy boats his former lover, now dying, sends, magically filled with provisions for him. A gentle sort of meditation on death.
• "This Is Not Concrete", by Ben Francisco -- a suddenly-precognitive girl and her father hunt for the Concrete Man (a figure of animate, well, concrete) which killed her mother and brother. The story works quite well, of course, read literally, and it wasn't until just now that I noticed the pun in the title. Now I need to reread it with that in mind. Even read literally I thought it was the best story in the issue -- it reminded me a bit of "The Ghost-Hunter's Beautiful Daughter" from Asimov's some months back.
• "The Famous Detective and His Telepathy Goggles", by Sean Adams -- exactly what it says on the tin. Short, amusing, absurd, steampunk.
• "Box", by Susannah Mandel (poem) -- remarkably vivid and evocative given it's only four lines long. Exemplifies the technical skill (in this case particularly the use of meter) I find lacking in modern poetry.
• "Circumnavigation, With Dogs", by Richard Gess -- could be considered an SF-twist story, not that it's not foreshadowed for the alert reader, and its format is interesting, and I actually liked it quite a bit regardless of the twist. Of course with my current job I suddenly take a lot more notice of travel-related things.
• "The Sleeper", by Eilis O'Neal -- "My brother sleeps... I don't." Obviously hits close to home in a lot of ways, which makes it really, really creepy. Aaaaaugh.
• Three Poems by Jeannine Hall Gailey -- Three poems about a fox-wife and her husband. They call to mind Neil Gaiman's "The White Road" and the Decemberists' The Crane Wife.
• "Heliotrope Hedgerow", by Christa Bergerson (poem) -- An English sonnet! At least in rhyme structure, an English sonnet, though the meter until the ending couplet is altogether more complex and interesting. A nice bit of imagery in "take the key and cross through the clover door / transcend sublunary forevermore"
• "The Queen's Reason", by Richard Parks -- a nice twist on the Emperor's New Clothes fable.
• "Music of the Spheres", by Daniel Braum -- obviously references the jazz musician Sun Ra. I think a lot of the interesting oddity in the story is borrowed from Sun Ra himself rather than the author's own invention, but if the story gets you to give Sun Ra a listen, that's a good thing.
• "The Problem with Strudel", by Sarah Tourjee -- really, really odd. Either the protagonist has some form of mental illness or that world is really, really odd. Or both.
• "Elephants of the Platte", by Thomas Israel Hopkins -- A man and his amnesiac wife travel the Nebraska Canal from New York to the West Coast, in this oddly quiet little post-oil tall tale.
• "Exuviation", by Haihong Zhou -- first appeared in Science Fiction World, the biggest Chinese science fiction magazine; translated by the author. The odd physiology of the cavers, humans who've evolved to live their entire lives in caves, similar to the blind salamanders and so on, and the choices they make in an alien environment to stay faithful to their nature or try to fight it.

Theresa's father is named Gregor, which means vigilant. He makes more noise in his sleep than he does when he's awake. His first language is silence. When he sits in a chair with his legs spread wide, his elbows resting on his thighs, his fingers interlaced, and his head bowed, it means he's thinking hard, or praying. When he stands with his legs as far apart as his shoulders, glaring at you with his arms crossed, it means he's angry. When he puts his right hand on his hip and breathes in light, quick breaths---like an inverse sigh---it means he is frustrated, or sad.

from "This is Not Concrete", by Ben Francisco

Still going...

Asimov's, August 2010

A particularly arresting cover, IMO. An issue without a novella, which is usually a good sign.

• "Superluminosity", by Alan Wall (short story). Fell immediately and obviously into the category I mentioned yesterday (stories about insecure heterosexual white men, subtype: prove that you love me), and I skimmed it, didn't see anything to disabuse me of my first impression, and punted on it.
• "The Lovely Ugly", by Carol Emshwiller (short story). An... interesting story. (Also, warning, rape triggers.) The viewpoint character is a member of a species which achieved spaceflight and gave it up, and now maintains a studied luddite-ism. It's an interesting viewpoint. They're visited by humans, and the viewpoint character falls in love(? lust? ??) with a female member of the human crew. Lots of stuff to unpack here about race and gender and colonialism and power dynamics. I'm still not sure what I think of it.
• "Crimes, Follies, Misfortunes, and Love", by Ian Creasy (novelette). A non-misogynistic post-apocalypse! The story centers around a bunch of grandmothers in a post-Peak Oil geneology club, basically, which has the ironic problem of having too much information about their ancestors (blogs and Flickr and Twitter and even direct sense-recordings), rather than not enough. Well-characterized and thought-provoking.
• "The Battle of Little Big Science", by Pamela Rentz (short story). Another quiet little story, about one scientist's quest to get her funding for a time machine project renewed by the local tribal council. Also well-characterized and thought-provoking!
• "Warning Label", by Alexander Jablokov (novelette). A Doctorow-esque memetic engineering piece set in a world so full of warning labels that even particularly contagious memes acquire them, Wikipedia [citation needed]-style. The utility of charismatic politicians.
• "The Witch, the Tinman, the Flies", by J.M. Sidorova (short story). A not particularly SFnal but nevertheless affecting story about a geneticist in the Soviet Union and her young apprentice, by a Russian writer.
• "On the Horizon", by Nick Wolven (short story). An odd little story about a former criminal who's been trained to pick up the thoughts and feelings of other criminals, in an unspecified SFnal way, and used as a sort of human bloodhound for criminal activity. Gets a bit of a Dickian paranoid milieu right and ends suitably ambiguously.
• "Slow Boat", by Gregory Norman Bossert (novelette). Gets a geek main character exactly right (and a female geek main character, no less). A skilled corporate hacker wakes up to find herself on the slow boat to Mars (quite literally), and hilarity ensues. Hilarity here being defined as "a competent and clever person stuck in a cargo transport for half a year with only their personal digital assistant for a companion can come up with all manner of interesting revenge".

One advantage of taking the T to and from work every day is that I have a fair bit of reading time. Oddly, though both Asimov's and Analog are published by the same company, presumably printed by the same printer, etc., Pandemonium has only the September issue of the latter and not the former, or I'd have started it already.

Remaining to review: LCRW 25, and New Genre 6, the latter of which I picked up on a whim from Porter Square Books thisThursday morning.

As promised yesterday...

Asimov's, July 2010

A couple good stories, and a nice futuristic cityscape cover.

• "The Other Graces", by Alice Sola Kim (short story). This story, about a young Korean-American woman applying to colleges with the telepathic help of future versions of herself, brought back both fond and not-so-fond memories of being in high school and trying to get into college, and of being in college. I identified with the main character a lot. It also got me to learn at least very basically how to enter Korean hangul into my computer so I could run Google Translate on it. (It turns out that 대황, used as a nonsense syllable throughout the story, translates to 'rhubarb'.) Excellent.
• "Haggle Chips", by Tom Purdom (novelette). It had a promising opening line ("It was a very civilized hijack."), but I got as far as that part where the (needless to say, male) main character was being assigned three women for "emotional regulation" by his captors and punted. Maybe it gets better from there; perhaps I will come back to it later. I'm increasingly running out of interest in SF that exercises the fantasies and fears of white heterosexual men, lately, because I've read it all already.
• "Eddie's Ants", by D.T. Mitenko (short story). Another promising opening line ("Eddie laughs when he finds out what a gun does."), and a bit of a cute premise (a man tries repeatedly and ever more creatively to kill an alien hive mind for stealing his girlfriend), but ultimately it's another plot driven by white heterosexual male insecurity. I came back to it after I'd read the rest of the magazine, and it was okay -- some mildly interesting discussion of human society as a cooperative organism, akin to ants or bees -- but nothing particularly special.
• "The Jaguar House, In Shadow", by Aliette de Bodard (novelette). Set in the universe of her forthcoming "Aztec fantasy" novel Servant of the Underworld (in September), a universe where the Chinese discovered America before Columbus. A fascinating (and fascinatingly alien) set of interlocking religious and political systems, conflicted and sympathetic characters, some meditation on leadership, especially leadership under a corrupt higher leader. From a technical standpoint, it has some continuity issues, which I lay at the feet of the editors mostly, but those are relatively minor. Easily the best thing by her I've read to date (and I feel like there was something besides February's "The Wind-Blown Man", but I can't remember what).
• "Amelia Pillar's Etiquette for the Space Traveller", by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (short story). What is says on the tin. Short. Cute.
• A History of Terraforming, by Robert Reed (novella). I started it but the main character didn't compel me, the main antagonist(?) was a cartoonishly-manipulative female environmentalist straight from Central Casting, and, having skimmed the end, it's more than a bit heavy-handed in its didacticism. Not really worth it.

I'm still awake (Thursday), so I should at least get through the Asimov's...

I'm behind in my reviewing, for whatever that's worth. It's not that I haven't been reading the magazines, though it has been mostly magazines I've been reading -- I've been making ~no progress on my to-read stack of novels. Work has of course been consuming a lot of my energy. Also, more lately, the sleep meds I've been taking, some hours before bed, have been causing me to be a zombie pretty much up until bed. When I can't muster energy to get out of my chair, let alone read or watch TV or write, I can't really have a productive evening to speak of. I took the meds a bit later tonight -- I've been playing around with dosages and timing some (melatonin in the 300-1000 microgram range, nothing heavy-duty, thank goodness), so I'll write as much as I have energy for while I wait for it to kick in. I'm not liking it much, this twilight life, but I go in for the follow-up to my sleep study tomorrow, so hopefully that will point me in more productive directions.

Asimov's, June 2010

A seriously underwhelming issue.

• "The Emperor of Mars", by Allen M. Steele (novelette). I feel like I've read this one before -- pop psychology mixed with SFnal exceptionalism. Basically a young man, working on Mars, suffers the loss of his family and retreats into a universe constructed out of the SF books he's been reading, in which he's the titular emperor, in order to cope. Doesn't condemn his escapism, at least, but nothing hugely special.
• "Petopia", by Benjamin Crowell (short story). A cast-off electronic pet winds up in French-speaking Africa. Some commentary about digital haves and have-nots and so on, and the values different cultures place on things, and a bit of "the Street finds its own uses for technology", but it didn't really grab me.
• "Monkey Do", by Kit Reed (short story). Writer's animal learns to write, outshines writer, hilarity ensues. That's pretty much it.
• "The Peacock Cloak", by Chris Beckett (short story). A bit of an allegory on good and evil, set in a virtual world which recapitulated the Fall -- a dialogue between God and the Devil in SFnal clothing, basically -- and neither hugely novel in its outlook nor particularly deft in its approach, but well-told, and containing some nicely vivid imagery.
• "Voyage to the Moon", by Peter Friend (short story). An odd, arthropod From the Earth to the Moon. It's nicely alien, and it's fun to discover the odd nature of the world and try to understand it along with the characters.
• "Dreadnaught Neptune", by Anna Tambour (short story). I couldn't figure out where this was going, skipped to the end, skimmed the middle, and was still confused. The 1950's milieu that's pretty common in SF short stories doesn't do a lot for me, and this is no exception.
• Earth III by Stephen Baxter (novella). I couldn't get into the last story in this series, and I couldn't get into this one. Meh.

I'm not asleep yet. I'll get through as many reviews as I can tonight and post them, one a day for the next N days, until I run out.

Life continues to be a whirlwind.

It was announced a week ago Friday that the company I work for, ITA Software, is in the process of being bought by Google. (!!!!) Yes, I still have a job; certainly for the next N months while the US Department of Justice decides whether to let the deal go through or not, and quite likely thereafter. We love our existing and prospective customers!

I'm pretty sure "work for Google" was on my nebulous list of life goals somewhere, and it wasn't an especially long list. (Sample other life goals: attend MIT, have software to which I've contributed reviewed favorably in PC World, start a company...) It feels a little odd but good to find myself looking for new life goals because I've completed most of my existing ones.

I went in and did my sleep study (a polysomnogram and a multiple sleep latency test) last week, and I have the follow-up appointment to go over the results this week, so hopefully soon I will have some real data about my sleep issues. I'm tempted to ask for copies of the raw data files they collected, because I'm curious to see how they're formatted, and I think it might be fun to play around with the information a bit.

Working as I do for one of the largest commercial users of Lisp in the world, I find myself wanting Emacs's tools, specifically SLIME, for navigating Lisp code. Being a Vim user, I find myself with Emacs buffers unintentionally full of j's and k's a lot, and otherwise generally unable to function without the keybindings I've internalized. I know vim so well that it disappears in my hands; not so with Emacs. (In addition to being unfamiliar, Emacs's default keybindings are hell on my wrists.) Now of course Emacs is famous for being ~infinitely customizable, and in fact it comes with a pretty complete reimplementation of vi in Elisp, called viper-mode. Unfortunately this is a reimplementation of vi, not vim, and vim is vastly more full-featured. Figuring that I couldn't possibly be the only person with this problem -- after all, the excellent viPlugin for Eclipse secretly implements vim keybindings -- I spent a long time searching the net for a vim mode for Emacs.

Finally I found this vim-mode, which lives at bitbucket. Unfortunately it became rapidly clear that it was missing a bunch of features I rely on intuitively, and so, after swearing some, going back to Google, and failing to find a better vim mode, I forked it and started writing the missing features I wanted. It's mostly to a point now where the keybindings I reach for with muscle memory are in place. Patches are of course welcomed, and I'll eventually get around to pushing everything upstream. (I've been working with our Boombox web service middleware layer and not with Lisp so much at work lately, so I haven't really been using the vim-mode. It turns out that learning Elisp, Emacs internals, Mercurial, Common Lisp, QPX, Boombox, a new company's procedures, and the airline industry all at the same time is actually too much for me to do all at once, so I've had to prioritize. :-)

...oh, and it looks like the maintainer has fixed most of the things I found lacking since I looked last. Cool. I'll have to try out the latest version.

Edit: Also, I think I'm mostly dug out from under the snowbank of e-mails, so if you sent something more than a few days ago expecting a response and haven't heard back from me yet, please resend it or contact me by some other method.

If you've e-mailed me in the past couple weeks and not gotten a response, I apologize -- I'm rather snowed under with e-mail right now. I haven't forgotten about you, promise. I'm not yet at e-mail bankrupcy level, thankfully. I think a lot of it will be solved by unsubscribing from or filtering a bunch of mailing lists I'm on; there's some serious triage that needs to happen in that area. But if you haven't heard back, that's why.

I manage my personal e-mail via Sup, more or less a console-based clone of GMail, which does a pretty good job of letting me wade through a couple hundred messages a day, though obviously it (and I!) have limits. What do you use?

Which is to say, I have the opposite problem from the one depicted in this XKCD comic.

I finished my first week at ITA Software. I now have a local build of the software running, which is further than I was a week into my last job, so I'll call that progress. I'm cramming everything there is to know about how the airline industry does scheduling and pricing into my head as fast as I can, which is mind-warping. They really do seem to be trying to come as close to charging exactly what the market will bear as possible -- my guess is that if they could do completely individualized pricing, they would. (And I shudder to think of the day Facebook gets into the travel business to do just that.) It's interesting work, though, my co-workers are awesome, and I'm getting to see a very different side of business than I did as a junior software engineer at StreamBase, so I'm enjoying it so far.

I'm also, unrelatedly, trying to cram a lot of the Chinese language into my head, as a friend has started a Chinese lesson group, which first met today. Why? Because I can? Because I like languages and don't know enough of them? Though I think my stated reasons are "to maximize the number of people in the world I can talk to" and "to be able to read Science Fiction World," the largest Chinese-language science fiction magazine and by extension likely the largest science fiction magazine in the world. Tones are coming pretty easily so far; I think my vocal music background may be helping here. The differences between the consonants c, t, s, q, and x are a lot harder. :-)

Spinning up at work obviously has most of my attention right now, but I continue to putter on various non-work things. (Well, tangential to work in both of the primary cases, really.) Anybody have experiences (good, bad, or otherwise) with mod_xslt2 for serving XML transformed using XSLT stylesheets on Linux? XSLT seems like such a natural fit for displaying data returned by these XML web service APIs I'm interacting with lately.