Well, my vacation is over. One week of traveling up north to the family cabin, a lot of writing, and generally just spending time with Fluffy and EDM.

I also got to spend time with my father (and his computer). Remarkably, he didn't give me a lecture about my weight, which was nice, but I'm still working on it. I did help him with some regular expressions, a bit of Java coding, and a philosophical discussion of Python.

Writing

On the writing side, Fluffy was really nice and let me write most of the seven hour trip up and down. I also got a number of hours to write before and after the trip too.

I'm trying to get to the end of the serial, so I wrote six chapters on the serial and got it completely through the third arc (in draft form). I only have about fifteen more chapters and the serial will be done. Posting wise, it will probably go into January but I've been thinking about this story for a year now (as of next week) and I'm struggling a lot with actually writing out these latter chapters.

This weekend, I also write five chapters for BAM fro the writing group. From what I guess, I'm only about 5-7 chapters from the end of that novel also, but they are much shorter chapters (2k verses 8k). I'm also doing my best not to think about the remaining chapters of BAM, so I don't struggle as much with actually writing it out when I get to that point. I'm also not as hung up about BAM as I was about FOTS. I'm planning on editing it and making it an ebook, but I haven't gotten this "perfectionist" attitude about it.

Programming

Python is an interesting thing about us. I gave it a year or so to to try it out, mainly at his insistence that it was a great language. It is, but it isn't my great language. But, it is a lot more flexible than Perl so it is becoming my "bang up a script" language (though most of the ad-hoc scripts this week were all Perl).

We did come up with a possible reason why. In C and Java, he prefers to put the brace at the end of the line:

if (bob) {
    doStuff();
}

In Python, that isn't much different:

if bob:
    do_stuff()

On the other hand, I prefer braces on the next line (BSD style):

if (bob)
{
    doStuff();
}

And that is different than Perl. So, one possibility is that I've become so used to having the brace "{" help me line up logic instead of using whitespace. It seems logical, but it also came up with an interesting quote.

How can you not like Python, I love it.

Program languages are strange that way. I reject Python because of little things (whitespace logic, package organization, module distribution, lack of braces, lack of semicolons), but I'm still good at it. But, it resonated with my dad and he loves it more than anything but Java.

Work

I did have a somewhat major call from work during my vacation. My code had a bug and it was about to be demostrated to our customers. It was a good thing I remember most of my code and I have a fantastic co-worker because I had no Internet connection and had to work by memory with someone else typing.