I made my first actual commit at TOPP yesterday.
Okay, okay. I deleted a period. It's not that cool. But the "woo! I can now actually contribute!" warm fuzzy feeling is cool regardless, and I'm now hunting for other easy (but a little more involved than deleting periods) tickets. Also, in the process of finding that blasted period, I learned about grep, ack, and other things including cpan (it's like pypi for perl instead of python, but I get the feeling most people encountered them in the reverse order - pypi is like a python CPAN). Also a cool learning-thing: <() which is the syntax for process substitution in bash - it is different from | (pipe) because it makes the stuff pretend to be a file. (Or makes it a file temporarily. They're kind of the same thing, I think.)
Also, I'm finding Conway's Law to be more and more amusing as time goes by. (My previous reaction was "Well, wait, of course. But why is this surprising?") Now it's become a (probably futile) game to see how far I can push Conway's law in projects...
Tonight is the kickoff for the Story Jam at UNICEF. I'm surprised at how calm I am right now, knowing that I'll be running around like a maniac for the next 3 days, and running around like a maniac for a few days after catching up on work and sleep. I'm actually determined to not let work slip at all this weekend. If I can do that, it will be the first Jam at which I've done so (the lack of sleep is something that I'm far too used to - well, I'll tackle that problem later in Seattle). Just need to write down a list of things I want to finish before Tuesday so that I can hold myself accountable.
Finally, I did not know thick blankets took that long to dry. I used up twice the money I was planning on spending on laundry this morning, and worked from I.House before lunch. (Did you know you can get wifi reception if you're sitting on top of the washer? Yeah!) Had I thought the blasted thing would dry between now and when I was going to sleep tonight, I would just hang it up and let it drip, but I was skeptical whether even that would happen (although I am not a very good judge of laundry water-saturation).
And with that draught of brain-breathing-room oxygen, I'm now going to plunge into 3 days of furiously anaerobic activity - see you on the other side...