Blog/August 2017/Aug 25th
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August 25th
It was a busy and somewhat frustrating week. You can:
Work
Work was full of ups and downs this week.
On the negative side, I had my hopes raised quite high only to have them be dashed on the shoals of disappointment. A friend of mine who’s known me for quite a long time, wanted to have me work with him on his contract. So he sent my CV to his client, and they responded that I have a “very impressive CV”, but that they “are looking for someone with more specific experience”. Both my friend and I feel that’s a mistake, since a very experienced but widely experienced person (such as me) can often work out much better solutions than someone who is very tightly focused on one specific area.
A shame, since the project would have been interesting and I would have liked to have worked with my friend.
On the positive side, I renewed contact with a few of my more recent contacts from LinkedIn, to ask them what’s going on. One responded that he was just talking to a customer of his, and that in a few days he might have something for me. He also informed me my hourly rate is too low (!), so if things work out with that guy, I’ll be happy to charge more. I’m worth it, after all!
And 8th development proceeded at a furious pace this week. Feedback on bugs, feature requests, and help requests — all took up a significant amount of time. But progress was pretty swift and (if I say so myself) impressive. As I told one of my customers, “the merely difficult I do immediately; the impossible takes a bit longer” (pace, my father ob”m). I’m anticipating making a quite significant new release next week.
One of my new users said among other kind words, “8th's security considerations are very remarkable, none of other dev tools I know provide such features. The syntax is really adorable. It is a very well documented project as well. When I started taking programming course, I was super excited, but soon after being surrounded by monster C++, I lost the joy of programming, but after discovering 8th, programming is fun again!” [sic]
Well, that’s our motto after all: MPFA! (Make Programming Fun Again!)
Our week
Our personal week also had its ups and downs. On the down side: our car’s brakes have been squealing for a while, but have gotten worse recently. There’s only 10.5 km. on the car, and the brakes are already protesting — so we decided we had to take the car in for service. Or, rather, we decided we had to schedule service. So I called the garage — the official garage for our kind of car, in our area of the country. We’ve been there many times in the past, with no problems getting in.
Not this time! The garage noted that our car is registered to a leasing company, and insisted that the leasing company had to send a repair request to them. The leasing company said that, no, even though the car is registered in their name, repairs are on us (excepting whatever is covered by the warranties), so they don’t need to send anything.
I spent upwards of two hours on the phone, going back and forth between the garage and the leasing company. Finally, the leasing agent had the garage’s head of customer-service contact me, and she finally did figure out that we should just be able to take the car in. So in the end, we did finally get an appointment for next week.
On the up side: one of my friends invited us to his daughter’s wedding. We went, and two other of my group of “Rambamist” friends were there. It was a mini Rambamist convention. I enjoyed getting to see my friends again, and we had some interesting discussions. “Mazal-tov” to the new couple!
Note for those of you who don’t know: “Rambamist” means, in this context, one who follows Jewish Law as explicated by Rambam’s Mishne Torah. “Rambam” is the Hebrew acronym for “Our Master, Moses son of Maimon”, also known as “Maimonides”. Those of us who follow his Code generally do so because it is complete, consistent, clearly written, and cogent. The majority of Jews do not follow this Code, at least not in detail.
Esther has abandoned me today, again. So while she did prepare the majority of the menu last night, it’s up to me to take up the slack. Fortunately, I’m a slacker, so I can do that with alacrity.
The weather was summer-normal this week, but it’s supposed to get hot over shabbat and stay that way for a couple days.
My nephew Chaim and his burgeoning family are joining us this shabbat! We’ll prepare:
baked chicken,
meatballs,
asado cholent,
marinated mushroom salad,
tabbouleh,
roasted eggplant,
cauliflower kugel,
baked potatoes and yams,
roasted veggies,
various salatim,
and cake.
Until next time,
shabbat shalom!
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