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.