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.