Vacation

Hello from the first full day of vacation!

The picture is of the Manuka or New Zealand Tea Tree in my mother's back yard. She had been bemoaning the difficulty of taking pictures of it, so I tried a few different angles and this is the one that I was the happiest with. It's basically a giant bush covered in pink flowers, and at this time of year, in bees. It puts on a nice display every year.

Yesterday was the day of travel heading on vacation, which was another wonderful example of how lovely and civilized travel by train is. I dread having to fly anywhere, but being able to curl up in a train seat with a good book and watch the world go by, and then get up and get food whenever I feel like it, is a pure pleasure.

I'm now almost caught up on book reviews except for the book I finished today. I brought a large pile of books with me and plan on reading until I feel unwound from recent events at work (organizational chaos, my former manager being let go for dubious reasons, an upgrade that's failed a couple of times and that I still need to do when I get back, and lots of frustrating argument about technical strategies). Then, I'll either just keep reading or poke at Debian and free software work.

It's lovely to have a whole week during which I can do anything I feel like doing.

Some other recent things of note:

• Several more weeks of Java notes are now up on my Java notes page. I'm about two-thirds of the way through Thinking in Java and getting anxious to start writing programs.

• I added some more information to my programming language background page for people who want to evaluate my opinions about programming languages in context.

• My AFS DNS SRV record draft was published as RFC 5864 as a Proposed Standard. I'm rather proud of that; it's my first published RFC where I was the sole author.

Posted: 2010-05-01 19:24 — Why no comments?