…it’s time to get myself back into life.

Before I get into that, though, everyone should take a look at Sunbird, or the Thunderbird plug-in of the same, Lightning. Also check into Enigmail and Addressbooks Synchronizer. There’s also Tor (with the Torbutton). When everything settles out, that provides a portable, effective, feature-heavy, and reasonably secure workspace. I’d take it over my work’s LotusNotes any day.

Now, in terms of my life. First things first, I need to reconnect with people a bit. I know that I am good and involved, then fall away, then get back and forth — the social pendulum of my life. Well, it’s swinging back. I’ve got to call BHurt, because we have a lot of catching up we have to do — that’ll be this weekend, so we can save on our cellular minutes. I’m going to make an appearance or two at ΘΧ during Brotherhood Week later this month. I definitely need to get back to church, and as soon as the Committee on Preparation for the Ministry has taken me under care, I am going to transfer over to Bryn Mawr — I like the community a lot, and I like the fact that they’re an outspoken member of More Light Presbyterians and have a focused mission: St Anne’s Place. Still thinking about what I’m going to do with Masonry, if anything — it was definitely worth joining, but I haven’t found continuing to be around to be that rewarding. Maybe I will as I get older.

For work, my goal is to get myself represented as a vendor. I’m just sick of dealing with the entire head-hunter world, and I’m really sick of them taking my money. I’d rather take other people’s money, thankyouverymuch. As a strong motivating force, I’ve decided to stick around at the current place place of work until I find myself a non-headhunter-ed gig. Besides, even if I were to go out looking, the best I’m finding is a 4% raise, and the contracting market seems to be hitting the 4Q cool-down hard. I’ve simply advanced in title beyond my experience right now, so I think I’ve hit a bit of a wall until some time passes. Good time to pull my shit together, since I’m not getting much of an alternative.

Also need to plow through all my e-mails and phone calls. I’ve fallen pretty far behind. Spam’s killed my mailboxes, too, so I need to move over to a different address — probably going to shift to a different domain, too.

One thing that I’ve discovered is that One of tha Few has been a lifesaver. She’s been working hard at getting my shit organized, and she’s taking care of a lot of crap that I just am no good at handling — like mail, bills, accounting. Critical stuff, y’know, but it just kills my soul to do it. She’s wonderful, because she’s been tackling all that for me, and doing a nice job of it.

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Why say no to free money? It’s neuro-economics, stupid

While it’s gratifying that economics is finally getting past the idea of man as a simplistic economic creature, I don’t think either the economists or the physcologists (two groups that, in general, are not known for their astute logic) have thought the matter through. I’d argue passing up free money can be logical. It’s all in how often the game is played.

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I had an annoying surprise recently.  I discovered that gcc has decided that long longs are 64 bits- on both 32- and 64-bit platforms.  I discovered this when I wanted to do a double-word multiply.  On 32-bit gcc this is easy- to multiply two 32-bit unsigned longs and get the 64-bit result, you simply cast one of the two to be long long and multiply away.  This is often incredibly usefull.  And I had thought that it was portable to all gcc platforms- only now I find out it isn’t.  This is especially annoying as, at least on 32 bit platforms, multiplying a long long by a long produces optimal code.  The x86 has a single, fast, instruction to multiply two 32-bit quantities to produce a 64-bit quantity.  In fact, this is the standard multiply instruction- the generated code just ignores the upper 32 bits when only a long result is desired.  I now have no easy way to access the capability. 

But this unpleasant discovery has gotten me thinking about integers and their role in programming- and what constraints a new programming language should hold to.

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